conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the
nature of the work, and come irrepressibly from it, and are necessary to
the completion of the work. Most works are most beautiful without ornament.
Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology. Clean and vigorous
children are conceived only in those communities where the models of
natural forms are public every day. Great genius and the people of these
states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are
properly told, there is no more need of romances.
The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and
by the justification of perfect personal candour. Then folks echo a new
cheap joy and a divine voice leaping from their brains. How beautiful is
candour! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candour.
Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that openness wins the
inner and outer world, and that there is no single exception, and that
never since our earth gathered itself in a mass has deceit or subterfuge or
prevarication attracted its smallest particle or the faintest tinge of a
shade--and that through the enveloping wealth and rank of a state or the
whole republic of states a sneak or sly person shall be discovered and
despised--and that the soul has never been once fooled and never can be
fooled--and thrift without the loving nod of the soul is only a foetid
puff--and there never grew up in any of the continents of the globe, nor
upon any planet or satellite or star, nor upon the asteroids, nor in any
part of ethereal space, nor in the midst of density, nor under the fluid
wet of the sea, nor in that condition which precedes the birth of babes,
nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in that condition that
follows what we term death, nor in any stretch of abeyance or action
afterward of vitality, nor in any process of formation or reformation
anywhere, a being whose instinct hated the truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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