" The favourable verdict of mankind" —
Born of the hustled public's hasty mind —
Has naught to do with Art in any guise
That artists can respect or recognize.
Is Art a criminal to hide her face
Till juried thick-wits shall approve her grace?
Reject the thought that she will e'er entreat
The favour of the plain Man in the Street.
The genius of appreciation flows
In channels that the plain man never knows;
The talent called intelligence is rare,
It needs a Southern slope and Attic air.

" The taste for art," of which the tyros treat —
That phrase to awe the plain Man in the Street —
Has never been, nor ever will be, known.
Art has its grammar and its rules of tone.
The seeing, like the making, calls for care,
For energy of thought, and vision rare.
All art is foreign to the natural man,
And has no place in Nature's primal plan;
Habit is never Nature, and the part
That habit plays is all there is of art.

Art, in whatever guise, from " bad" to " best,"
Must face the moving mind's relentless test,
Must face the test of unity, as mind,
And take its place as common or refin'd.

Mind has one standard, and but one alone,
To measure everything of mortals known.
There's not one standard for appraising art,
And one for other tools of Life apart.
Back of expression is the mental play,
The form and colour can but chart the way.

Art comes full circle in its ordered sight,
Sustained and perfect in its lyric flight,

The picture falls within the centred sight
And types the unity that woos delight.
In that one vision, clarified and true,
A failure to conform would wreck the view
And mark the broken and the static thought
That's always under-done or over-wrought.
The poise of perfect method comes and goes;
But never " happens" — as some folk suppose.
There are no accidents in art's domain,
The perfect picture types the perfect strain.

Pictorial art has unity of aim,
Its aim is pleasure, with no rival claim;
Its unit is the picture that portrays
A single point of view, a focussed phase.

In paint, as words, selection turns the scale,
The master shuns, the tyro seeks, detail.
In works of art observe what men omit,
Rigid rejection is the rule of wit.

All art pictorial is, in sober sooth,
Naught but illusion based upon the truth;
And thus the truth of art, for which men sigh,
Is, after all is said, truth of the lie.

Great art achieves the beauty of repose,
That clear content the Milo Venus knows;
That restfulness the Elgin Marbles share,
Serene and ample as the morning air.

The New translates the Old: forms fade and fail;
But Art abides to tell again the tale
In form as fair, and fitted to the need
That larger thought and broader methods breed.
For ever fashioning, for ever new,
Her moods are many, tho' her paths are few.

The pictures of the Past are dead and dim,
The chiselled marbles shattered, torn and grim;
The colour that the Grecians gave to men
Lives only in the record of the pen;
The golden word alone can mock at Time
In changeless beauty as the cycles chime.

The quenchless quest of all the troubled years
Is for the clean expression Fame inspheres.
Men seek life's painful secret to disclose
In forms that fit their fleeting joys and woes:
In Word, and Stone, in Colour, and in Song —
The paths of thought to object, that prolong
A little space the records of their part —
The paths that parallel, and men call art.