Most works are most
beautiful
without ornament.
Whitman
When
liberty goes, it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go: it
waits for all the rest to go--it is the last. When the memories of the old
martyrs are faded utterly away--when the large names of patriots are
laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators--when the boys
are no more christened after the same, but christened after tyrants and
traitors instead--when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted, and
laws for informers and blood-money are sweet to the taste of the people--
when I and you walk abroad upon the earth, stung with compassion at the
sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship, and calling no
man master--and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves--
when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night, and surveys its
experience, and has much ecstasy over the word and deed that put back a
helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel
inferiority--when those in all parts of these states who could easier
realise the true American character, but do not yet[1]--when the swarms of
cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly
involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures
or the judiciary or Congress or the Presidency, obtain a response of love
and natural deference from the people, whether they get the offices or no--
when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary
than the poorest free mechanic or farmer, with his hat unmoved from his
head, and firm eyes, and a candid and generous heart--and when servility by
town or state or the federal government, or any oppression on a large scale
or small scale, can be tried on without its own punishment following duly
after in exact proportion, against the smallest chance of escape--or rather
when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any
part of the earth--then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged
from that part of the earth.
[Footnote 1: This clause is obviously imperfect in some respect: it is here
reproduced _verbatim_ from the American edition. ]
As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concentre in the real body and
soul and in the pleasure of things, they possess the superiority of
genuineness over all fiction and romance. As they emit themselves, facts
are showered over with light--the daylight is lit with more volatile
light--also the deep between the setting and rising sun goes deeper many-
fold. Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a
beauty: the multiplication-table its--old age its--the carpenter's trade
its--the grand opera its: the huge-hulled clean-shaped New York clipper at
sea under steam or full sail gleams with unmatched beauty--the American
circles and large harmonies of government gleam with theirs, and the
commonest definite intentions and actions with theirs. The poets of the
kosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and turmoils and
stratagems to first principles. They are of use--they dissolve poverty from
its need, and riches from its conceit. You large proprietor, they say,
shall not realise or perceive more than any one else. The owner of the
library is not he who holds a legal title to it, having bought and paid for
it. Any one and every one is owner of the library who can read the same
through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in whom
they enter with ease, and take residence and force toward paternity and
maternity, and make supple and powerful and rich and large. These American
states, strong and healthy and accomplished, 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 any comic or tragic prints, 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 allowed; but those ornaments can be allowed 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 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.
Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and
comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and
destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of
nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs--
these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of
the greatest poet from his birth. Caution seldom goes far enough. It has
been thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen who applied himself
to solid gains, and did well for himself and his family, and completed a
lawful life without debt or crime. The greatest poet sees and admits these
economies as he sees the economies of food and sleep, but has higher
notions of prudence than to think he gives much when he gives a few slight
attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life
are not the hospitality of it, or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond
the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few
clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned,
and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the
melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to
the toss and pallor of years of money-making, with all their scorching days
and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or
infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve,--and
all the loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers and
atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you
pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness
and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete,
and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty,--is the
great fraud upon modern civilisation and forethought; blotching the surface
and system which civilisation undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears
the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the
reached kisses of the soul.
liberty goes, it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go: it
waits for all the rest to go--it is the last. When the memories of the old
martyrs are faded utterly away--when the large names of patriots are
laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators--when the boys
are no more christened after the same, but christened after tyrants and
traitors instead--when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted, and
laws for informers and blood-money are sweet to the taste of the people--
when I and you walk abroad upon the earth, stung with compassion at the
sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship, and calling no
man master--and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves--
when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night, and surveys its
experience, and has much ecstasy over the word and deed that put back a
helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel
inferiority--when those in all parts of these states who could easier
realise the true American character, but do not yet[1]--when the swarms of
cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly
involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures
or the judiciary or Congress or the Presidency, obtain a response of love
and natural deference from the people, whether they get the offices or no--
when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary
than the poorest free mechanic or farmer, with his hat unmoved from his
head, and firm eyes, and a candid and generous heart--and when servility by
town or state or the federal government, or any oppression on a large scale
or small scale, can be tried on without its own punishment following duly
after in exact proportion, against the smallest chance of escape--or rather
when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any
part of the earth--then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged
from that part of the earth.
[Footnote 1: This clause is obviously imperfect in some respect: it is here
reproduced _verbatim_ from the American edition. ]
As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concentre in the real body and
soul and in the pleasure of things, they possess the superiority of
genuineness over all fiction and romance. As they emit themselves, facts
are showered over with light--the daylight is lit with more volatile
light--also the deep between the setting and rising sun goes deeper many-
fold. Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a
beauty: the multiplication-table its--old age its--the carpenter's trade
its--the grand opera its: the huge-hulled clean-shaped New York clipper at
sea under steam or full sail gleams with unmatched beauty--the American
circles and large harmonies of government gleam with theirs, and the
commonest definite intentions and actions with theirs. The poets of the
kosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and turmoils and
stratagems to first principles. They are of use--they dissolve poverty from
its need, and riches from its conceit. You large proprietor, they say,
shall not realise or perceive more than any one else. The owner of the
library is not he who holds a legal title to it, having bought and paid for
it. Any one and every one is owner of the library who can read the same
through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in whom
they enter with ease, and take residence and force toward paternity and
maternity, and make supple and powerful and rich and large. These American
states, strong and healthy and accomplished, 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 any comic or tragic prints, 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 allowed; but those ornaments can be allowed 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 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.
Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and
comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and
destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of
nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs--
these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of
the greatest poet from his birth. Caution seldom goes far enough. It has
been thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen who applied himself
to solid gains, and did well for himself and his family, and completed a
lawful life without debt or crime. The greatest poet sees and admits these
economies as he sees the economies of food and sleep, but has higher
notions of prudence than to think he gives much when he gives a few slight
attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life
are not the hospitality of it, or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond
the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few
clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned,
and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the
melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to
the toss and pallor of years of money-making, with all their scorching days
and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or
infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve,--and
all the loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers and
atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you
pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness
and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete,
and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty,--is the
great fraud upon modern civilisation and forethought; blotching the surface
and system which civilisation undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears
the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the
reached kisses of the soul.
