LABOUR AND ART;
Or, the Conversion of Binks.
You have stood at some time, I suppose, with a sense of disaster
And gazed at a picture resembling an egg on a mat,
Or a sideslip of squares in the mode of a Pimlico master?—
Well, Binks's "Rebellion" and "Afternoon Tea in my Flat"
Were extremely like that.
He was nuts upon Beauty was Binks, and from boyhood acquainted
With Art, and so bound to her side with such delicate links
That I doubt if the soul of her, much as we've written and painted,
Had ever been fathomed (for is she not strange as the Sphinx?)
Till she got to know Binks.
He had hundreds of phases, and all of them highly sensational,
A Cubist unbending, a Vorticist equally stout;
Scorned one thing, he said, and one only, the Representational,
Meaning, I take it, a school where there isn't much doubt
What the whole thing's about.
And at times he would say, as I stared at his riotous scrimmages
And asked what on earth was the meaning, "You must have regard
To the mind of the artist, for Art is a matter of images,"
And it seemed that he thought all these things when he gazed very hard
At a tub in a yard.
But at times he would tell me that Art was a mere interweaving
Of hues and designs; he had done what he could to expel
All thoughts and all visual objects, for these were deceiving,
And I told him, so far as an ignorant layman could tell,
He had done that quite well.
But I think that of all of his phases the last was most funny;
He was vestured in white when I met him by chance in the town;
He had shaved off his beard, his beard, like Apollo's, of honey;
His hair was quite short, he had lost his habitual frown,
He was looking quite brown.
He told me he never exhibited now in a gallery;
Commissions were filling his time and engaging his heart;
What was more, he observed, he was making a regular salary,
So I asked him to tell me the worst and explain from the start
What had happened to Art.
"I have banished Design," he informed me, "and thoughts are all duller
Than Beauty, and Beauty is Art; but no critic can grouse
At the notion of Absolute Pure Indivisible Colour
As calm as Eternity, smooth as omnipotent nous—
I am painting a house."
Evoe.
Visitor. "Your father seems to be having a stiff time with the roller?"
Daughter of the House. "Oh, mummy only sets him on to it when he's been naughty."