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Read & copy
“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.”
Meaning & context
Cather’s narrator presents artistic development as increasingly exact honesty about perception and expression rather than as mere technical display or sudden inspiration.
Source details
The Song of the Lark, Part VI, Chapter X, Project Gutenberg #44. ‘Artistic growth is... a refining of the sense of truthfulness’ is narrator reflection immediately after Harsanyi calls passion the artist's ‘open secret’ and as Thea Kronborg comes into fuller command of her mature performance. It belongs to Cather's fictional account of artistic formation and performance, not an empirical measurement of artistic development or a guarantee that all artists mature in the same way.