THE ARTIST’S AIM.
In candor, my friend, you seem too much at home
With nymphs of Olympus and gods of old Rome.
The world has advanced, and the artist, if sage,
Will seek to give form to the thoughts of his age.
The curve of a limb and the pose of a head
May be all the same in the living as dead;
But she that you woo, must have life and be young
And speak, ere you love her, and speak your own tongue.
Truth only is lasting, and only the face
Transfigured by it has a lasting grace.
And truth is in nature, nor dealt second-hand
Through art, though most artful to fill the demand.
So think of the present, its deeds and its dreams,
As Raphael thought, but not Raphael’s themes;
Nor be a Venetian to picture like Titian
A woman to worship or goddess to kiss.
You are a new-world’s man: model from this.
Ay, let the dead bury their dead, and pursue
The aims of a people that push for the new.
The proudest ambition, the readiest hand,
Might wisely embody ideals less grand;
No sweeter Murillo’s divine designs,
Whose purity rivals each thought it refines,
While the dreamy intent of a life-brooding haze
Throngs thick with the beauty of immature praise.
Conceptions immaculate still may be
In the pure white light that he could see,
Inspired to incarnate a soul in each plan,
The life of a picture as well as of man.
The wants of the present, one never can gauge
By the heathenish tastes of a heathenish age.
The mummy lived once, and spoke as it ought.
We moderns, forgetting its life and its thought,
For lost art sighing, too oft re-array
What is only a corpse, and ought to decay.
E’en if it were living, long centuries fraught
With progress in action and feeling and thought
Outgrow the old charms, and make the world crave
New phases of art that the past never gave.
So I fear, when I see men striving to mold
The forms of the new after those that are old,
While all true life grows better and better,
That classical models a modern may fetter.
Small virtue has one with no hope in his heart,
And little of merit, if none in his art.
While only the light of a coming ideal
Lures those to the good who imagine it real,
No work can ever inspire the earth
That embodies no promise of unfulfill’d worth,
And naught that the world accounts worthy of fame,
In art as in act, but is rank’d by its aim.