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 the '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 visions 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,