CH. II THE LAMP OF TRUTH 83

may deceive, for a moment, the mason’s, as the other the jeweller’s, eye; and that it can be detected only by the closest examination. Yet exactly as a woman of feeling would not wear false jewels, so would a builder of honour disdain false ornaments. The using of them is just as downright and inexcusable a lie.¹ You use that which pretends to a worth which it has not; which pretends to have cost, and to be, what it did not, and is not; it is an imposition, a vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin. Down with it to the ground, grind it to powder, leave its ragged place upon the wall, rather; you have not paid for it, you have no business with it, you do not want it. Nobody wants ornaments in this world, but everybody wants integrity. All the fair devices that ever were fancied, are not worth a lie. Leave your walls as bare as a planed board, or build them of baked mud and chopped straw, if need be; but do not rough-cast them with falsehood.

This then, being our general law, and I hold it for a more imperative one than any other I have asserted; and this kind of dishonesty, the meanest, as the least necessary;* for² ornament is an extravagant and inessential thing; and therefore, if fallacious, utterly base-this, I say, being our general law, there are, nevertheless, certain exceptions respecting particular substances and their uses.

* Again too much fuss and metaphysics about a perfectly simple matter; inconclusive besides, for the dishonesty of machine work would cease, as soon as it became universally practised, of which universality there seems every likelihood in these days. The subject was better treated subsequently in my address to the art-students of Mansfield, now reprinted in Vol. XI. of my “Works” series (A Joy for Ever).3 [1880.]

¹ [The MS. adds, “,and the better the thing is cut the more subtle is the falsehood.”]

² [The MS. reads: “necessary; for helps in structure and hues in colour are partly of necessity and partly of permission, like the kind of undergirding and colouring which are perhaps allowable in policy or in kindness, but ornament is ...”]

³ [In the 1880 edition the last words of this note were: “which I hope presently to reprint, and sum the conditions of verdict in the preface to the new edition of my Political Economy of Art.” “Of course I did not get the intended preface written” is added in the list of errata following the Advice of 1880 (above, p. liii.). There was, however, a new preface to the re-issue of 1880. The lecture to the Mansfield Art Class is contained in §§ 166-174 of A Joy for Ever.]

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