Classic Poem

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;
The " Christian painter," of the " pious" tone,
Whose life Vasari has in frankness shown.
And flame-shod Corot, of the Rules of Love,
Whose gay diversions Gallic writers glove.
Or Turnet, god of Ruskin's praise and pray'r,
Who painted towns as red as sunsets rare;
Yet Ruskin knows, none other knows so well,
The gentle truth would ring the timely knell
Of all the " moral" platitude that flows
Melodious in his blithe, effective prose.

In words an artist, Ruskin types the kind
Of British Philistine born colour-blind.
His raging raids in paint reveal a man
Built on the monkish and ascetic plan,
Who hates the Renascence, and loathes the Greeks,
And loves Rossetti's ill-drawn, deathly freaks.
His mind is feminine, and lacks the sense
That springs from sturdy manhood strong and tense.

Pictorial beauty does not charm his eye,
He craves emotion, and the maudlin sigh;
Also, the childish literary guile
That passes with Pre-Raphaelites as style.
He cannot grip the fact, to others known,
That painting has a language of its own;
That masters of the medium impart
Thro' living colour tones their sense of art;
And, just as Music has no need of word;
But soars in sound waves like the song of bird,
So painting in its ample, just domain
Relies on Form and Colour for its strain.