Short Poems

Impressions that impress are somewhat rare —
To catch the shiver of the open air
And paint it with a touch refin'd and true
Is only given to the chosen few.
Impressions are experience, and they teach
The painter's depth, his consciousness and reach.

The sun-god men who work in shadeless ways,
And welcome beauty born of golden days,
Should not forget that Nature yields to mood,
That, at her best, she's neither coarse nor crude.
Her superb palette has both tint and tone
No painter of impressions need disown.

Melchers has turned from Bible lore at last,
And seeks, with saner work, to blot the past.
His sight is normal when, rejecting guile,
He weds to truth of substance truth of style.
His kind-eyed Holland maids of canny face
Are touched of colour and convincing grace;
And sometimes with that tempered technique sing
That Henry James would call " the real right thing."

In Yankee mining camps where strangers roam
In search of sudden wealth not found at home;
Where life is cheap and whiskey very " high,"
And pistols lead to mansions in the sky;
The Music Halls entice the ennuy'd crowd
With cracked pianos, tired of life but loud;
And signs abound, this sign among the rest,
" Don't shoot the player, for he does his best."

Blanche is Boldini minus Southern fire;
But one will flicker and the other tire:
Neither is great, for each has won a place
With more of reclame than abiding grace.
And yet, perhaps, they meet the Ruskin test,
And " try, with loving care, to do their best."

Technique! that " vesture visible of mind,"
That stamps its maker vulgar or refin'd.
The right technique! how much there is in that
Your flashy brushman only boggles at!

Of pose eccentric and of colour coarse,
Boldini struggles for a tour de force .
He has a clipping cleverness of tone,
And skirts, but never mounts, the master's throne.
His morbid technique gives the eye offence,
A technique tiresome to the finer sense.

Of drawing crude and colour like the night,
The Ribot paintings still assault the sight.
His scullion and his cook and frying-pan,
And shrouded woman of a pallid plan
With lantern face and long Rossetti jaw —
Defy the canons of artistic law.

A sun-kissed field of golden, billowed grain
Is wrought in Cazin's most romantic vein;
That lyric vein informed of art's repose,
And moist with beauty as a dew-drenched rose.

O Red Rag of the Legion! cheap but fair,
How Merit flings thee to the startled air!
Thy function in this world is manifold,
The soldier loves thee, and the bourgeois bold;
But there is none that loves thee quite so much
As brushman putting Fortune to the touch.