manufacture may yet be to come. The paintings of Raphael and of
Buonaroti gave force to the falsehoods of superstition, and majesty to
the imaginations of sin; but the arts of England may have, for their
task, to inform the soul with truth, and touch the heart with
compassion. The steel of Toledo and the silk of Genoa did but give
strength to oppression and lustre to pride: let it be for the furnace
and for the loom of England, as they have already richly earned, still
more abundantly to bestow, comfort on the indigent, civilization on the
rude, and to dispense, through the peaceful homes of nations, the grace
and the preciousness of simple adornment, and useful possession.
LECTURE IV.
INFLUENCE OF IMAGINATION IN ARCHITECTURE
_An Address Delivered to the Members of the Architectural
Association, in Lyon's Inn Hall, 1857._
If we were to be asked abruptly, and required to answer briefly, what
qualities chiefly distinguish great artists from feeble artists, we
should answer, I suppose, first, their sensibility and tenderness;
secondly, their imagination; and thirdly, their industry. Some of us
might, perhaps, doubt the justice of attaching so much importance to
this last character, because we have all known clever men who were
indolent, and dull men who were industrious. But though you may have
known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was
so; and, during such investigation as I have been able to give to the
lives of the artists whose works are in all points noblest, no fact
ever looms so large upon me--no law remains so steadfast in the
universality of its application, as the fact and law that they are all
great workers: nothing concerning them is matter of more astonishment
than the quantity they have accomplished in the given length of their
life; and when I hear a young man spoken of, as giving promise of high
genius, the first question I ask about him is always--
Does he work?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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