For America
These things ought to be said again and again to the point of satiety, if we wish to save any remnants. Coming from me, whose opinions carry some weight, they are repeated when I am no longer on the spot. People feel the justice of them, the shaft goes home. A few who are more ardent than the rest propagate them and stir up a current of opinion that may lead to reform. There is no reason therefore to fear repeating them in America, where also people have fallen into the general error. American artists have followed our teaching, altogether in a bad sense. Notwithstanding that in taking their point of departure they could have escaped into the good epochs of art, they have saddled themselves with the poverty of modern taste.
Let them return to the school of the past; above all, let them return to nature; it is as beautiful with them as elsewhere. The mountains, the trees, the vegetation, the men and women of their own country—these should be their masters in architecture and sculpture. America is full of will. It desires to be a great nation. It stops at no expense in order to obtain instruction; it creates immense universities, libraries, museums. It pours into them streams of money. The favor with which my work has been received there is the sign of a movement toward truth in art; they are developing an affection for this naturalistic school which borrows from life its charm and its variety. But all this will be as nothing unless America creates work of its own; unless it breaks with the old errors of the nations of Europe in order to find the path of true science.