These American States, strong and healthy and accomplish'd, shall
receive no pleasure from violations of natural models, and must not
permit them. In paintings or mouldings or carvings in mineral or wood,
or in the illustrations of books or newspapers, or in the patterns of
woven stuffs, or anything to beautify rooms or furniture or costumes, or
to put upon cornices or monuments, or on the prows or sterns of ships,
or to put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which
distorts honest shapes, or which creates unearthly beings or places or
contingencies, is a nuisance and revolt. Of the human form especially,
it is so great it must never be made ridiculous. Of ornaments to a work
nothing outre can be allow'd--but those ornaments can be allow'd that
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 jetted and conceiv'd 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 demean'd to romances. As soon
as histories are properly told, no more need of romances.
The great poets are to be known by the absence in them of tricks, and by
the justification of perfect personal candor. All faults may be forgiven
of him who has perfect candor. 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 gather'd itself
in a mass have 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 discover'd and despised--and that the
soul has never once been fool'd and never can be fool'd--and thrift
without the loving nod of the soul is only a fœtid puff--and there
never grew up in any of the continents of the globe, nor upon any planet
or satellite, nor in that condition which precedes the birth of babes,
nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in any stretch of
abeyance or action 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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