THE PALACE OF ART.
(New Version).
PART I.
I BUILT myself a lordly picture-place
Wherein to play a Leo's part.
I said, "Let others cricket, row, or race,
I will go in for Art!"
Full of great rooms and small my Palace stood,
With porphyry columns faced,
Hung round with pictures such as I thought good,
Being a man of taste.
The pictures—for the most part they were such
As more behold than buy—
The quaint, the queer, the mystic over-much,
The dismal, and the dry.
One seemed all black and grey—a tract of mud,
One gas-jet glimmering there alone;
Above, all fog; below, all inky flood;
For subject—it had none.
One showed blue chaos flecked with falling gold.
Like Danaë's tower in dark;
A painter's splash-board might more meaning hold
Than this æsthetic lark.
And one, a phantom form with limbs most lank,
Adumbrated in ink and soot;
The Genius of Smudge, with spectral shank
And unsubstantial boot.
Nor these alone, but many a canvas bare,
Fit for each vacuous mood of mind,
The gray and gravelike, vague and void, were there
Most dismally designed.
* * * * *
Or two wan lovers in a curious fix,
Wreathed in one scarf by some queer charm,
Upon the margin of a caverned Styx
Stood shivering arm-in-arm.
Or by a garden-prop, posed all askew
'Neath apples bronze, with brazen hair,
A chalk-limb'd Eve and snake of porcelain blue
Exchanged a stony stare.
* * * * *
Nor these alone, but all such legends fair
As the vagarious Wagner mind
Would pick from Mythus' shadowy realm, were there,
With ample space assigned.
To women weird and wondrous, long of jaw,
And lank of limb, and greenish as with mould,
And full-red lips and shocks of fulvous hair,
And raiments strange of fold.
No raven so delighteth in its song,
Of sad and sullen monotone,
As I to watch those ladies lean and long,
And angular of bone.
And to myself I said, "All these are mine.
Let the dull world take Nature's part,
'Tis one to me; I hold no thing divine
Save this Brown-Jonesian Art,
"Wherein no ROBINSON shall dare to plant
His Philistinish hoof,
Who feels no mystic mediæval want,
But paints in truth's behoof!
"O Mediæval Mystery, be it mine
To clasp thee, faint and fain;
Sniffing serene at low souls that decline,
On sense and meanings plain."
Then my eyes filled, my talk waxed large and dim
Of BOTTICELLI'S deathless fame:
"Quaint immaturity to reach with him,"
I cried, "is Art's true aim.
"To plunge, self-blinded, in the mystic past,
That makes the present small:
If eyes artistic be not backward cast,
Why have we eyes at all?"
Punch, July 7, 1877.
PART II.
YET oft the riddle of Art's real drift
Flashed through me as I sat and gazed.
But not the less some season I made shift
To keep my wits undazed.
And so I mused and mooned; for three long weeks
I stood it: on the fourth I fell.
All trace of natural colour fled my cheeks,
And I felt—far from well.
* * * * *
Hollow-cheeked, hectic, rufus-headed dames,
With opiate eyes, and foreheads all
As wan as corpses', but with wings like flames,
Glared on me from each wall.
Those fixed orbs haunted me; I grew to hate
Those square and skinny jaws, those high-cheek bones.
Nocturnes in soot and symphonies in slate
Moved me to sighs and groans.
Queer convolutions of dim drapery
Inwrapt me like a Nessus-snare.
I seemed enmeshed in tangles hot and dry
Of copper-coloured hair.
I loathed the pallid Venuses and Eves,
Nymph-nudity, and Sorceress and Thrall;
The Wings prismatic, the metallic Leaves—
I loathed them one and all.
I howled aloud, "I would no more behold
A witch, an angel, or a saint.
Aught mediæval-mystic, classic-cold,
Or cinque-cento quaint.
"It may be that my taste has come to grief,
But if the spectral, dismal, dry,
Do constitute 'High Art,' 'tis my belief
High Art is all my eye."
So when four weeks were wholly finishéd,
I from my gallery turned away.
"Give me green leaves and flesh and blood," I said,
"Fresh air and light of day.
I pine for Nature, sickened to my heart
Of the affected, strained, and queer.
What was to me Ambrosia of Art
Hath grown as drugged small-beer.
"Yet pull not down my galleries rich and rare:
When Art abjures the crude and dim,
I yet may house the High Ideal there.
Purged from preposterous Whim!"
Punch, July 14, 1877.
The following poem appeared in The Times for May 9, 1859, and although not included in the collected works of the Poet Laureate, it has been generally ascribed to his pen. In its warlike promptings, and cheap national bunkum, it resembles the other so-called patriotic songs of this author, of whom nobody ever heard that he took up a rifle for his country, or assisted the Volunteer movement in any way whatever:—