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
foetid 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.
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