English

Israels caters to the worldly-wise;
But maudlin scenes do not his game disguise.
Is bread so dear in Holland that a man
Need prostitute his art, as painter can
When lured into the broad and easy way
Where Art's assassins strangle her for pay?

Brave Matthÿès Maris could an answer give,
That happy one who never paints to live
But lives to paint, careless of gold and fame —
Contemptuous of the money-catcher's aim.

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.

The Raffailli sketches, coarse yet quaint,
Are like a Charles Keene black-and-white in paint.
His Dannat " study" has official grace,
The sitter's Red Rag proudly in its place
And blabbing reclame at the button-hole —
The focussed symbol of a Gallic dole.

The style of Dannat seems to shift and veer
And vanish like the snows of yester-year;
Until at last the jesters all expect
To see him try each spring a new " effect."

The foggy Carriere mocks the Maris scheme
Of misty colour, faint as fleeting dream.
What is with Maris an authentic trait,
Copied by Carriere ranks as second-rate.

The works of Matthÿès Maris are a kind
To linger in the cloisters of the mind.
His dear, dream-faces call up love-led days
When winsome maidens dwelt on hidden ways,
And stainless Faith transfigured hall and bow'r —
The old gray years when knighthood was in flow'r,
And the Red Swineherd wound his elfin horn,
And casements oped " in fairy-lands forlorn."

Here's Muhrman with his landscapes of the Heath,
Gray skies above, poetic scenes beneath.
Why does he linger on the white chalk shores
Where the Pecksniffian Ruskinite adores
The musty " moral" tale, and counts as dross
All paint that does not preach or teach, or toss
A sop to virtue? Has he turned aside
By Happy Hampstead ever to abide?
One knows not, yet 't were well to name in rhyme
A pure pictorial painter of his time,
Whose landscapes with the solemn sorcery glow
That 's born of wistful sunsets fading slow.

Ten feeble efforts to depict the nude
Are titled Music , as though colour crude
Had aught to do with rhythm, as though name
Divorced from style could bring a bungler fame.
The work that lacks of beauty, lacks of thought —
In paint, as words, real worth is beauty-fraught.