Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/197

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Use and Ornament
177

names of the artists who designed them, whose immortality they really are. And though the official guide may refresh our memory with snippets of history, and say this, that, or the other about the name to which the temple remains attached—the really important thing that lives, survives, and influences us is not the externally applied name, but the invested beauty which has no name, but is soul incarnate in stone to the glory of God—the self-realisation of a being who (but for that) has passed utterly from remembrance.

That, as I have said before, is the nearest thing to immortality that we know. And it comes to us, in a shape which, (so to be informed with immortality) cannot limit itself to the demands of use. When all the claims of use are satisfied, then the life of personality begins to show—the fullest and the most permanent form of self-realisation known to man on earth lies in ornament.

Of course, when I say "ornament," I use the word in a very wide sense. What I have said of sculpture, painting or architecture, applies equally to poetry, music or philosophy. I would even go further, and apply it in other directions where no material matrix for it exists. Every department of mental activity has its ornament—the culminating expression of that particular direction of the human will. Faith is the ornament of destiny, Hope the ornament of knowledge, Love the ornament of sex. Without these ornaments destiny and