open to you--yes, and the work of Paradise; for in bringing all this,
in perpetual and attractive truth, before the eyes of your fellow-men,
you have to join in the employment of the angels, as well as to imagine
their companies.
And observe, in this last respect, what a peculiar importance, and
responsibility, are attached to your work, when you consider its
permanence, and the multitudes to whom it is addressed. We frequently
are led, by wise people, to consider what responsibility may sometimes
attach to words, which yet, the chance is, will be heard by few, and
forgotten as soon as heard. But none of _your_ words will be heard
by few, and none will be forgotten, for five or six hundred years, if
you build well. You will talk to all who pass by; and all those little
sympathies, those freaks of fancy, those jests in stone, those
workings-out of problems in caprice, will occupy mind after mind of
utterly countless multitudes, long after you are gone. You have not,
like authors, to plead for a hearing, or to fear oblivion. Do but build
large enough, and carve boldly enough, and all the world will hear you;
they cannot choose but look.
I do not mean to awe you by this thought; I do not mean that because
you will have so many witnesses and watchers, you are never to jest, or
do anything gaily or lightly; on the contrary, I have pleaded, from the
beginning, for this art of yours, especially because it has room for
the whole of your character--if jest is in you, let the jest be jested;
if mathematical ingenuity is yours, let your problem be put, and your
solution worked out, as quaintly as you choose; above all, see that
your work is easily and happily done, else it will never make anybody
else happy; but while you thus give the rein to all your impulses, see
that those impulses be headed and centred by one noble impulse; and let
that be Love--triple love--for the art which you practise, the creation
in which you move, and the creatures to whom you minister.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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