ART.
FROM THE FRENCH OF THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.
Yes, art with grievous pangs is born
From Nature’s most endearing molds;
The child is torn,
Not wooed, from fierce rebellious folds.
Slay not thy art by false constraint,
Yet know her rules are stern as Fate;
Without complaint
The muse should wear a buskin strait.
Would’st have thy verse endure, thy muse
The common facile forms must shun,
The slipshod shoes
In which so many feet have run.
Sculptor, beware the plastic clay,
Changing at every whim’s command
From day to day,
And marred by every careless hand.
Strive with the marbles pure of Greece,
Wrested from Paros’ snowy mines,
Smite, and release
The deep-imprisoned god-like lines.
The chisel of Praxiteles
Such peerless beauty had not known,
If art in Greece
Had deigned to use a meaner stone.
Let the fierce molten metal fuse
Heroic forms and high contours
Of Syracuse;
Nought but the matchless bronze endures.
Upon the agate’s flinty face
Apollo’s features high and pure
In profile trace,
With touches delicate and sure.
Beware of water and pastel,
Deep on fantastic vase and urn
Thy colors frail
In seven-fold heated furnace burn.
Fashion the writhing, maddening limb
Of nymph and goddess; bring once more
The monsters grim,
Dear to the blazonry of yore.
The virgin mother saintly mild,
Crowned with her nimbus; on her breast
The wondrous child,
The globe beneath the cross of Christ.
Crowns fall and sceptres pass, robust
And radiant art outlives them all.
Torso and bust
Survive the city’s triple wall.
The medal by the ploughman found
Reveals the countenance austere,
The temples crowned,
That filled the antique world with fear.
Even the gods wax old and pass
From high Olympus; verse alone,
Stronger than brass,
Preserves to fallen Zeus his throne.
The graver guide with care supreme,
The chisel smite, fix like a rock
Thy floating dream
Deep in the stem resisting block.
Tongues and religions die, while art,
Poised in the lofty realms of thought,
Serene, apart,
Exults in sempiternal youth.