Art and Truth Theme Analysis

Of writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others’ uses, will write now for mine,—
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.

‘Better far,
Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means,
Than a sublime art frivolously.’

‘I go hence
To London, to the gathering-place of souls,
To live mine straight out, vocally, in books;
Harmoniously for others, if indeed
A woman’s soul, like man’s, be wide enough
To carry the whole octave (that’s to prove)
Or, if I fail, still, purely for myself.
Pray God be with me, Romney.’

When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus,
I took a chamber up three flights of stairs
Not far from being as steep as some larks climb,
And, in a certain house in Kensington,

Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to work
In this world,—’tis the best you get at all;
For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction. God says, ‘Sweat
For foreheads;’ men say ‘crowns;’ and so we are crowned

Shall I fail?
The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,
‘Let no one be called happy till his death.’
To which I add,—Let no one till his death
Be called unhappy. Measure not the work

Until the day’s out and the labour done;
Then bring your gauges. If the day’s work’s scant,
Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;
And, in that we have nobly striven at least,
Deal with us nobly, women though we be,
And honour us with truth, if not with praise.

Ay, but every age
Appears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)
Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!
The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound
Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:
A pewter age,—mixed metal, silver-washed;
An age of scum, spooned off the richer past;
An age of patches for old gaberdines;
An age of mere transition, meaning nought,

Except that what succeeds must shame it quite,
If God please. That’s wrong thinking, to my mind,
And wrong thoughts make poor poems.

Every age,
Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it.

I thought, ‘Now, if I had been a woman, such
As God made women, to save men by love,—
By just my love I might have saved this man,

And made a nobler poem for the world
Than all I have failed in.’ But I failed besides
In this; and now he’s lost! through me alone!
And, by my only fault, his empty house
Sucks in, at this same hour, a wind from hell
To keep his hearth cold, make his casements creak
For ever to the tune of plague and sin—
O Romney, O my Romney, O my friend!
My cousin and friend! my helper, when I would,
My love, that might be! mine!

‘Meantime your book
Is eloquent as if you were not dumb;
And common critics, ordinarily deaf
To such fine meanings, and, like deaf men, loth

To seem deaf, answering chance-wise, yes or no,
‘It must be,’ or ‘it must not,’ (most pronounced
When least convinced) pronounce for once aright:
You’d think they really heard,—and so they do ...
The burr of three or four who really hear
And praise your book aright: Fame’s smallest trump
Is a great ear-trumpet for the deaf as posts,
No other being effective. Fear not, friend;
We think, here, you have written a good book,
And you, a woman! It was in you—yes.’

I rode once to the little mountain-house
As fast as if to find my father there,
But, when in sight of’t, within fifty yards,
I dropped my horse’s bridle on his neck
And paused upon his flank. The house’s front
Was cased with lingots of ripe Indian corn
In tesselated order, and device
Of golden patterns: not a stone of wall

Uncovered,—not an inch of room to grow
A vine-leaf. The old porch had disappeared;
And, in the open doorway, sate a girl
At plaiting straws,—her black hair strained away
To a scarlet kerchief caught beneath her chin
In Tuscan fashion,—her full ebon eyes,
Which looked too heavy to be lifted so,
Still dropt and lifted toward the mulberry-tree
[…]
Enough. My horse recoiled before my heart—
I turned the rein abruptly. Back we went
As fast, to Florence.

‘That is consequent:
The poet looks beyond the book he has made,
Or else he had not made it. If a man
Could make a man, he’d henceforth be a god
In feeling what a little thing is man:
It is not my case. And this special book,
I did not make it, to make light of it:
It stands above my knowledge, draws me up;
’Tis high to me.’

‘Ah, my friend,
You’ll learn to say it in a cheerful voice.
I, too, at first desponded. To be blind,

Turned out of nature, mulcted as a man,
Refused the daily largesse of the sun
To humble creatures! When the fever’s heat
Dropped from me, as the flame did from my house,
And left me ruined like it, stripped of all
The hues and shapes of aspectable life,
A mere bare blind stone in the blaze of day,
A man, upon the outside of the earth,
As dark as ten feet under, in the grave,—
Why that seemed hard.’

My Romney!—Lifting up my hand in his,
As wheeled by Seeing spirits toward the east,
He turned instinctively,—where, faint and fair,
Along the tingling desert of the sky,
Beyond the circle of the conscious hills,
Were laid in jasper-stone as clear as glass
The first foundations of that new, near Day
Which should be builded out of heaven, to God.

He stood a moment with erected brows,
In silence, as a creature might, who gazed:
Stood calm, and fed his blind, majestic eyes
Upon the thought of perfect noon. And when
I saw his soul saw,—‘Jasper first,’ I said,
‘And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony;
The rest in order, ... last, an amethyst.