To draw is not to moralize but see —
External beauty is the painter's plea.
His aim, indeed, is Colour, Form and Line.
A master can make many themes divine —
But to limn anecdote as wittols may
Is to employ the unpictorial way
Of making Subject serve for lack of Style,
In mode as easy as a brushman's guile.

What colour-worker shall inform his strain
Of Shakespeare's melody or Plato's brain,
Or tear the mask from Nature and portray
The secret springs of Life's impassioned play?
The spirit is not always clothed of grace,
The foulest mind may flaunt the fairest face:
And yet what master of melodious prose
Shall paint that face in action or repose,
And realize its beauties to the sight
In terms of truth and pure pictorial light?
By its perfection only shall an art
Real pleasure to the expert mind impart,
And not by casual comments upon life,

Can colour teach the Sermon on the Mount?
There be who think so, men of some account,
Who year by year with tawdry canvas try
To blaze with paint a pathway to the sky;
As tho' Christ's deathless Word were out of date,
And two dimensions could make meaning straight.

To make a school of Morals out of Art
Is to corrupt them both, in whole and part.

The measure of morality in art
Is whether it achieves its perfect part;
Pretence in any craft is moral crime,
A Creed must reach to act in space and time.
And if there's aught immoral 'neath the sun
T is work that never should have been begun;
That uncompleted task of every man
Who toils without a clean artistic plan.
Art " morals" may be measured by the sight,
Artistic crime is never moral " right."

Morals are but the order of the Whole
Typed in the Self, the individual soul.
The moral is the ordered thing in life.
And the immoral — friction, waste and strife.

Morals tho' fair, are often touched of " bleat,"
To paint with insight is a " moral" feat;
As moral as the Knob upon a Door,
When fitted to its uses; but no more.

To Ruskin, art's a preachment, " false" or " true" —
Not an " arrangement" of enticing hue.
That is his basic blunder, and it breeds
A mirthful medley in his painting-creeds.
" Select naught and neglect naught" is the rule
He fixes for the brushmen of his school;
And no more artless message could be brought
To mark the range and limit of his thought.

A painting fails of beauty when it shows
The unrelated thing in touch or pose;
For every detail on the canvas shown
Must wed the wooing harmony of tone.

Beauty makes all things fair, from high to low,
Because no imperfections from her flow;
Her very sadness wears a singing face,
Glad with the singing gladness of her grace.
She hides all flaws; fits sorrow to a hymn;
Gives flashing sight to eyes that tears bedim;
She chokes our laughter with a sobbing sigh;
She checks our sobbing with a mirth made high.
In her religion, murder, love and tears
Course rhythmic thro' the even-flowing years
As melodies in one enchantment strong —
The moving music of her matchless song.

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;