English

It is not " wisdom," " worth," or " moral" theme
That stamps the artist's vision as supreme;
It is that pow'r he has in age and youth
To see all things in terms of ideal truth —
To see in terms of beauty, and to say
All things in terms of music, fresh and gay.

Hegel is dead but writers still abound
To throttle sense and amateurs confound
With cant of art " symbolic," and the sheen
Of " moral" art, and art's " religious" mien,
Till tired readers, alien to the game,
Think seeing and not-seeing are the same;
Taught, in a tortuous and a cloudy way,
That masters none but " moral" r├┤les essay.

Uncommon-sense is common everywhere,
But common-sense is most uncommon rare.

View Raphael, whom puritans adore,
Who flaunted " moral" canvases galore;

" The favourable verdict of mankind" —
Born of the hustled public's hasty mind —
Has naught to do with Art in any guise
That artists can respect or recognize.
Is Art a criminal to hide her face
Till juried thick-wits shall approve her grace?
Reject the thought that she will e'er entreat
The favour of the plain Man in the Street.
The genius of appreciation flows
In channels that the plain man never knows;
The talent called intelligence is rare,
It needs a Southern slope and Attic air.

" The taste for art," of which the tyros treat —
That phrase to awe the plain Man in the Street —
Has never been, nor ever will be, known.
Art has its grammar and its rules of tone.
The seeing, like the making, calls for care,
For energy of thought, and vision rare.
All art is foreign to the natural man,
And has no place in Nature's primal plan;
Habit is never Nature, and the part
That habit plays is all there is of art.

Art, in whatever guise, from " bad" to " best,"
Must face the moving mind's relentless test,
Must face the test of unity, as mind,
And take its place as common or refin'd.

Mind has one standard, and but one alone,
To measure everything of mortals known.
There's not one standard for appraising art,
And one for other tools of Life apart.
Back of expression is the mental play,
The form and colour can but chart the way.

Art comes full circle in its ordered sight,
Sustained and perfect in its lyric flight,

The picture falls within the centred sight
And types the unity that woos delight.
In that one vision, clarified and true,
A failure to conform would wreck the view
And mark the broken and the static thought
That's always under-done or over-wrought.
The poise of perfect method comes and goes;
But never " happens" — as some folk suppose.
There are no accidents in art's domain,
The perfect picture types the perfect strain.

Pictorial art has unity of aim,
Its aim is pleasure, with no rival claim;
Its unit is the picture that portrays
A single point of view, a focussed phase.

In paint, as words, selection turns the scale,
The master shuns, the tyro seeks, detail.
In works of art observe what men omit,
Rigid rejection is the rule of wit.

All art pictorial is, in sober sooth,
Naught but illusion based upon the truth;
And thus the truth of art, for which men sigh,
Is, after all is said, truth of the lie.

Great art achieves the beauty of repose,
That clear content the Milo Venus knows;
That restfulness the Elgin Marbles share,
Serene and ample as the morning air.

The New translates the Old: forms fade and fail;
But Art abides to tell again the tale
In form as fair, and fitted to the need
That larger thought and broader methods breed.
For ever fashioning, for ever new,
Her moods are many, tho' her paths are few.