We hope that some more of the hidden treasures will shortly be catalogued
and shown. In the vaults at present there is a very remarkable
bas-relief of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, and another representing
the professional mourners weeping over the body of the dead. The fine
cast of the Lion of Chæronea should also be brought up, and so should the
_stele_ with the marvellous portrait of the Roman slave. Economy is an
excellent public virtue, but the parsimony that allows valuable works of
art to remain in the grim and gloom of a damp cellar is little short of a
detestable public vice.
L’ENVOI
An introduction to _Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf_ by Rennell Rodd, published
by J. M. Stoddart and Co., Philadelphia, 1882.
AMONGST the many young men in England who are seeking along with me to
continue and to perfect the English Renaissance—_jeunes guerriers du
drapeau romantique_, as Gautier would have called us—there is none whose
love of art is more flawless and fervent, whose artistic sense of beauty
is more subtle and more delicate—none, indeed, who is dearer to
myself—than the young poet whose verses I have brought with me to
America; verses full of sweet sadness, and yet full of joy; for the most
joyous poet is not he who sows the desolate highways of this world with
the barren seed of laughter, but he who makes his sorrow most musical,
this indeed being the meaning of joy in art—that incommunicable element
of artistic delight which, in poetry, for instance, comes from what Keats
called “sensuous life of verse,” the element of song in the singing, made
so pleasurable to us by that wonder of motion which often has its origin
in mere musical impulse, and in painting is to be sought for, from the
subject never, but from the pictorial charm only—the scheme and symphony
of the colour, the satisfying beauty of the design: so that the ultimate
expression of our artistic movement in painting has been, not in the
spiritual vision of the Pre-Raphaelites, for all their marvel of Greek
legend and their mystery of Italian song, but in the work of such men as
Whistler and Albert Moore, who have raised design and colour to the ideal
level of poetry and music. For the quality of their exquisite painting
comes from the mere inventive and creative handling of line and colour,
from a certain form and choice of beautiful workmanship, which, rejecting
all literary reminiscence and all metaphysical idea, is in itself
entirely satisfying to the æsthetic sense—is, as the Greeks would say, an
end in itself; the effect of their work being like the effect given to us
by music; for music is the art in which form and matter are always
one—the art whose subject cannot be separated from the method of its
expression; the art which most completely realizes for us the artistic
ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly
aspiring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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