Meaning of “the entire vitality of art depends upon its…”

Thrift, Chapter XIV, “Riches and Charity,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles argues that money alone cannot reform conduct and says change from intemperance, improvidence and irreligion requires earnest purpose, self-devotion and hard work; that nineteenth-century reform context is preserved.

Adam Bede, Book Second, Chapter XVII, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” Project Gutenberg #507. “Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult” appears in Eliot’s narrator-level defence of realistic representation and the difficulty of saying the exact truth about people and feelings. It is literary-aesthetic argument inside the novel, not an empirical psychology result.

Unto This Last, fourth essay; Project Gutenberg #36541. The line follows Ruskin’s distinction between production and consumption and retains the nineteenth-century political-economy setting.

The Simple Life, Chapter IV, “Simplicity of Speech,” Mary Louise Hendee translation, Project Gutenberg #23092; Wagner criticizes language that replaces fact with display.

On the Art of Writing, Lecture VI, Project Gutenberg #17470; Quiller-Couch is recalling the preceding lecture’s argument about jargon and prose.

Poems of Power, “I Am,” published 1903; Project Gutenberg #6667. The poem is explicitly spiritual and metaphysical, so the line remains poetic purpose language rather than proof of a predetermined cosmic assignment.