Profound Words

From Chapter XVII, "In Which The Story Pauses A Little," of George Eliot's Adam Bede:

So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin-- the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius, is apt to forake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelis-- much harder to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

There is for me a stronger reality in Eliot's words than there is in, say, the Keatsian notion that "Beauty is truth, truthy beauty," a statement that appeals to one's idealisms about beauty but which eventually becomes something roughly akin to a great lie. One has to remember, though, that Keats was writing in his early 20s, and I can understand his desire to make such a correspondence, but such a statement finally seems less an idealism than a naivete.