Possibly it is a purely subjective impression, but I seldom face a masterpiece in art without suffering a slight melancholy, and this feeling is never influenced by the subject. The pastoral peace that hovers like a golden benison about Giorgione's Concert at the Louvre, the slow, widowed smile of the Mona Lisa, the cross-rhythms of Las Lanzas, most magnificent of battle-pieces, in the Velasquez Sala at the Prado, even the processional poplars of Hobbema at the National Gallery, or the clear cool daylight which filters through the window of the Dresden Vermeer—these and others do not always give me the buoyant sense of self-liberation which great art should. It is not because I have seen too often the bride Saskia and her young husband Rembrandt, in Dresden, that in their presence a tinge of sadness colours my thoughts. I have endeavoured to analyse this feeling. Why melancholy? Is great art always slightly morbid? Is it because of their isolation in the stone jails we call museums? Or that their immortality yields inch by inch to the treacherous and resistless pressure of the years? Or else because their hopeless perfection induces a species of exalted envy? And isn't it simply the incommensurable emotion evoked by the genius of the painter or sculptor? One need not be hyperÆsthetic to experience something akin to muffled pain when listening to certain pages of Tristan and Isolde, or while submitting to the mystic ecstasy of Jan Van Eyck at Ghent. The exquisite grace of the Praxiteles Hermes or the sweetness of life we recognise in Donatello may invade the soul with messages of melancholy, and not come as ministers of joy.

One can't study the masters too much—I mean, from the amateur's view-point; in the case of an artist it depends on the receptivity of his temperament. Velasquez didn't like Raphael, and it was Boucher who warned Fragonard, when he went to Rome, not to take the Italian painters too seriously. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it sometimes stifles individuality. I think it is probably the belief that never again will this planet have another golden age of painting and sculpture that arouses in me the melancholy I mention. Music has passed its prime and is now entering the twilight of perfections past for ever. So is it with the Seven Arts. Nevertheless, there is no need of pessimism. Even if we could, it would not be well to repeat the formulas of art accomplished, born as they were of certain conditions, social as well as technical. Other days, other plays. And that is the blight on all academic art. "Traditional art," says Frank Rutter, "is the art of respectable plagiarism," a slight variation on Paul Gauguin's more revolutionary axiom. No fear of any artist being too original. "There is no isolated truth," exclaimed Millet; but Constable wrote: "A good thing is never done twice." Best of all, it was R. A. M. Stevenson who said in effect that after studying Velasquez at the Prado he had modified his opinions as to the originality of modern art. Let us admit that there is no hope of ever rivalling the dead; yet a new beauty may be born, a new vision, and with it necessarily new technical procedures. When I say "new," I mean a new variation on the past. To-day the Chinese and Assyrian are revived. It is the denial of these very obvious truths that makes academic critics slightly ridiculous. They obstinately refuse to see the sunlight on the canvases of the Impressionists just as they deny the sincerity and power of the so-called post-Impressionists. The transvaluation of critical values must follow in the trail of revolutions.

It is a pity that New York as yet has not had an opportunity of viewing the best CÉzannes, Gauguins, and Van Goghs. I did not see the exhibition several years ago at the Armory, which was none the less an eye-opener. But I have been told by those whose opinion and knowledge are incontrovertible that this trinity of the modern movement was inadequately represented; furthermore, Henri Matisse, a painter of indubitable skill and originality, did not get a fair showing. It would be a superfluous and thankless task to argue with critics or artists who refuse to acknowledge Manet, Monet, Degas. These men are already classics. Go to the Louvre and judge for yourself. Impressionism has served its purpose; it was too personal in the case of Claude Monet to be successfully practised by every one. Since him many have hopelessly attempted the bending of his bow. Manet is an incomplete Velasquez; but he is a great colourist, and interpreted in his fluid, nervous manner the "modern" spirit. Degas, master designer, whose line is as mighty as Ingres his master, is by courtesy associated with the Impressionistic group, though his methods and theirs are poles asunder. It seems that because he didn't imitate Ingres in his choice of subject-matter he is carped at. To-day the newest "vision" has reverted to the sharpest possible silhouettes and, to add confusion, includes rhythms that a decade ago would not have been thought possible.

II

I can't agree with those who call Paul CÉzanne the "Nietzsche of painting," because Nietzsche is brilliant and original while the fundamental qualities of CÉzanne are sincerity, a dogged sincerity, and also splendid colouring—the value of the pigment in and for itself, the strength and harmony of colour. His training was in the classics. He knew Manet and Monet, but his personal temperament did not incline him to their forms of Impressionism. A sober, calculating workman, not a heaven-storming genius, yet a painter whose procedure has served as a point of departure for the younger tribe. Like Liszt, CÉzanne is the progenitor of a school, for Wagner founded no great school as much as he influenced his contemporaries; he was too complete in himself to leave artistic descendants, and Liszt, an intermediate type, influenced not only Wagner but the Russians and the Neo-Frenchman. The greatest disciples of CÉzanne are Gauguin and Van Gogh. Mr. Brownell once wrote: "We only care for facts when they explain truths," and the facts of CÉzanne have that merit. He is truthful to the degree of eliminating many important artistic factors from his canvases. But he realises the bulk and weight of objects; he delineates their density and profile. His landscapes and his humans are as real as Manet's; he seeks to paint the actual, not the relative. There is strength if not beauty—the old canonic beauty—and in the place of the latter may be found rich colour. A master of values, CÉzanne. After all, paint is thicker than academic culture.

I saw the first Paul Gauguin exhibition at Durand-Ruel's in Paris years ago. I recall contemporary criticism. "The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad, flat tints on canvas that has the texture of tapestry. Many of these works are made repulsive by their aspect of multicoloured crude and barbarous imagery. Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental qualities, the lovely values, the ornamental taste, and the impression of primitive animalism." Since that rather faint praise Gauguin is aloft with the Olympians. His art is essentially classic. Again his new themes puzzled critics. A decorative painter born, he is fit for the company of Baudry the eclectic, Moreau the symbolist, Puvis de Chavannes, greatest of modern mural painters, and the starlit Besnard. A rolling stone was Gauguin, one that gathered no stale moss. He saw with eyes that at Tahiti became "innocent." The novelty of the flora and fauna there should not be overlooked in this artistic recrudescence. His natural inclination toward decorative subjects rekindled in the presence of the tropical wilderness; at every step he discovered new motives. The very largeness of the forms about him, whether human, vegetable, or floral, appealed to his bold brush, and I think that critics should take this into consideration before declaring his southern pictures garish. They often seem so, but then the sunset there is glaring, the shadows ponderous and full of harsh complementary reflects, while humanity wears another aspect in this southern island where distance is annihilated by the clarity of the atmosphere. No, Paul Gauguin is certainly not a plagiarist. Clive Bell has written: "Great artists never look back." I believe the opposite; all great artists look back and from the past create a new synthesis.

Wells has said: "Better plunder than paralysis," the obverse of Gauguin's teaching, and if Vincent Van Gogh "plundered" in his youth it was not because he feared "paralysis." He merely practised his scales in private before attempting public performance. Remember that none of these revolutionary artists jumped overboard in the beginning without swimming-bladders. They were all, and are all, men who have served their technical apprenticeship before rebellion and complete self-expression.

The gods of Van Gogh were Rembrandt, Delacroix, Daumier, Monticelli, and Millet. The latter was a veritable passion with him. He said of him, and the remark was a sign-post for his own future: "Rembrandt and Delacroix painted the person of Jesus, Millet his teaching." This preoccupation with moral ideas lent a marked intensity to his narrow temperament. Ill-balanced he was; there was madness in the family; both his brother and himself committed suicide. His adoration of Monticelli and his jewelled style led him to Impressionism. But colour for colour's sake or optical illusion did not long hold him. The overloaded paint in his earlier works soon gave way to flat modelling. His effects are achieved by sweeping contours instead of a series of planes. There are weight, sharp silhouettes, and cruel analysis. His colour harmonies are brilliant, dissociated from our notions of the normal. He is a genuine realist as opposed to the decorative classicism of Gauguin. His work was not much affected by Gauguin, though he has been classed in the same school. CÉzanne openly repudiated both men. "A sun in his head and a hurricane in his heart," was said of him, as it was first said of Delacroix by a critical contemporary. Vincent Van Gogh is, to my way of thinking, the greatest genius of the trio under discussion. After them followed the Uglicists and the passionate patterns and emotional curves of the Cubists.

Henri Matisse has science, he is responsive to all the inflections of the human form, and has at his finger-tips all the nuances of colour. He is one of those lucky men for whom the simplest elements suffice to create a living art. With a few touches a flower, a woman, grow before your eyes. He is a magician, and when his taste for experimenting with deformations changes we may expect a gallery of masterpieces. At present, pushed by friends and foes, he can't resist the temptation to explode fire-crackers on the front stoop of the Institute. But a master of line, of decoration, of alluring rhythms. Whistler went to Japan on an artistic adventure. Matisse has gone to China, where rhythm, not imitation, is the chiefest quality in art.

Such men as Matisse, Augustus John, and Arthur B. Davies excel as draughtsmen. The sketches of the first-named are those of a sculptor, almost instantaneous notations of attitudes and gestures. The movement, not the mass, is the goal sought for by all of them. The usual crowd of charlatans, camp-followers, hangers-on may be found loudly praising their own wares in this Neo-Impressionist school—if school it be—but it is only fair to judge the most serious and gifted painters and sculptors of the day. Already there are signs that the extremists, contortionists, hysterical humbugs, Zonists, Futurists, and fakers generally are disappearing. What is good will abide, as is the case with Impressionism; light and atmosphere are its lessons; the later men have other ideals: form and rhythm, and a more spiritual interpretation of "facts."

III

The Comparative Exhibition in New York over ten years ago proved that it is dangerous to mix disparate schools and aims and personalities. And while the undertaking was laudable, seeking as it did to dissipate our artistic provinciality, it but emphasised it—proved beyond the peradventure of a doubt American dependence on foreign art. Technically, to-day, the majority of our best painters stem from France, as formerly they imitated English models or studied at DÜsseldorf and Munich. When the Barbizon group made their influence felt our landscapists immediately betrayed the impact of the new vision, the new technique. Our younger men are just as progressive as were their fathers and grandfathers. Every fresh generation uses as a spring-board for its achievements the previous generation. They have a lot to put on canvas, new sights that only America can show. What matter the tools if they have, these young chaps, individuality? Must they continue to peer through the studio spectacles of their grandfathers? They make mistakes, as did their predecessors. They experiment; art is not a fixed quantity, but a ceaseless experimenting. They are often raw, crude, harsh; but they deal in character and actuality. They paint their environment—the only true historic method—and they do this with a modern technique. Manet, Goya, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler, and others may be noted in the technical schemes of nine out of ten native-born American artists. The question at issue is whether our new men have anything to say, and do they say it in a personal manner. I think the answer is a decided affirmative. We can't compete with the great names in art, but in the contemporary swim we fairly hold our own.

Consider our recent Academy exhibitions—and I prefer to take this stronghold of antiquated art and prejudices as a starting-point rather than the work of the out-and-out insurgents—consider, I repeat, the Academy, and then try to recall, say, ten years ago and the pictures that then hung on the line. Decidedly, as Zola would say, there has been a cleaning up of dirty old palettes, an inrush of fresh air and sunshine. In landscape we excel, easily leading the English painters. Of Germany I do not care to speak here: the sea of mud that passes for colour, the clumsiness of handling, and the general heavy self-satisfaction discourage the most ardent champion of the Teutonic art. In England, Burlington House still sets the fashion. At one Royal Academy I attended I found throngs before a melodramatic anecdote by John Collier, entitled The Fallen Ideal. It had the rigidity of a tinted photograph. But it hit the "gallery," which dearly loves a story in paint. The two Sargent landscapes did not attract, yet they killed every picture within optical range. Nor was Collier's the worst offence in an enormous gathering of mediocre canvases. One must go, nowadays, to the New English Art Club to see the fine flower of new English art. There Augustus John reigns, but he is not to be confined in parochial limits; he is a "European event," not merely Welsh. He dominates the club as he dominates English art. What's one man's paint may be another's poison. I never saw so many examples of his except in Mr. John Quinn's collection—who has the largest gathering in America of the work of this virile painter and draughtsman. His cartoon—The Flute of Pan (the property of Mr. Quinn)—hanging in the winter show of the English Art Club, reveals the artist's impulse toward large decorative schemes. At first the composition seems huddled, but the cross-rhythms and avoidance of facile pose are the reason for this impression. The work is magisterial. It grows upon one, though it is doubtful whether it will ever make the appeal popular. John's colour spots are seductive. He usually takes a single model and plays with the motive as varyingly as did Brahms in his variations on a theme by Paganini. But with all his transcendental virtuosity the Welsh painter is never academic; he is often rank in his expression of humanity, human, all-too-human, as Nietzsche would have said. A great personality (with greater potentialities) is that of Augustus John. But aside from his powerful personality and remarkable craftsmanship, who is there that can't be matched by our own men? There are no landscapists like ours—is it necessary to count them off name by name? Neither are our figure-painters excelled. I know comparisons are not courteous, and I forbear particularising. John S. Sargent, our greatest painter of surfaces, of the mundane scene, was not even born here, though he is of American parentage. Nevertheless, we claim him. Then there is Whistler, most elusive of our artists. Is he American? That question has been answered. He is, even if he deals with foreign subject-matter. Wonderfully wrought, magically coloured, rich and dim, are his pictures, and one, to employ the phrase of an English critic, is fain to believe that his brush was dipped in mist, not pigment.

Let us be catholic. Let us try to shift anew the focus of criticism when a fresh personality swims into our ken. Let us study each man according to his temperament and not insist that he should chime with other men's music. The Beckmesser style of awarding good and bad marks is obsolete. To miss modern art is to miss one of the few thrills that life holds. Your true decadent copies the past and closes his eyes to the insistent vibrations of his day. I know that it is not every one who can enjoy Botticelli and Monet, DÜrer and Manet, Rembrandt and Matisse. Ready-made admiration is fatal to youthful minds; nevertheless, we should, all of us, old as well as young—particularly the academic elderly—cultivate a broader comprehension of the later schools and personalities. Art is protean. But will, I ask myself, posterity sit before the masterpieces of Matisse, Picasso, and Van Dongen, and experience that nostalgia of the ideal of which I wrote at the beginning of these desultory notes? Why not? There may be other ideals in those remote times, ideals that may be found incarnate in some new-fangled tremendous Gehenna. But nature will always remain modern.

II

THE ITALIAN FUTURIST PAINTERS

Because I had strolled over to buy a newspaper at a kiosk hard by the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, I discovered an announcement that the Italian Futurists were holding an exhibition in De Roos Gallery on the Rokindam. This was early in September, 1912. What a chance, I thought, to compare the new with the old. After that glorious trinity, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Vermeer, hanging in the Rijks, what a piquant contrast to study the new-fangled heresies and fantastic high-kicking of the Futurists! This group, consisting of five Italian painters in company with the poet Marinetti as a self-constituted chef d'École, is perfectly agreed that all the old conventions of pictorial art have outlived their usefulness; that drawing, colour, perspective, harmonious composition must walk the plank as far as they are concerned; in a word, classic, romantic, impressionistic art is doomed; only symbolism will endure; for symbolism only is there a future. Signor Marinetti, who coined the hideous word, "Futurism," goes still further. Literature, too, must throw off the yoke of syntax. The adjective must be abolished, the verb of the infinite should be always employed; the adverb must follow the adjective; every substantive should have its double; away with punctuation; you must "orchestrate" your language (this outrivals RenÉ Ghil); the personal pronoun is also to disappear with the rest of the outmoded literary baggage, which was once so useful to such moribund mediocrities (the phrase is of Marinetti's making) as Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Alfieri; even D'Annunzio is become a moss-covered reactionary.

I purposely mention Marinetti and his manifesto for the reason that this movement in painting and sculpture is decidedly "literary," the very accusation of which makes the insurgents mightily rage. For example, I came across in De Kunst, a Dutch art publication in Amsterdam, a specimen of Marinetti's sublimated prose, the one page of which is supposed to contain more suggestive images and ideas than a library written in the old-fashioned manner. Here are a few lines (Battle is the title and the prose is in French):

"Bataille. Poids-odeur. Midi ¾ flutes glapissement embrasement toumb toumb alarme gargaresch Éraquement ÉrÉpitation marche," etc.

This parrot lingo, a mere stringing together of verbs and nouns, reminds one of the way the little African child was taught to say, dog, man, horse, cow, pump. When at Turin in March, 1910, they threw rotten eggs at Marinetti, in the Chiarella Theatre, the audience was but venting its feelings of indignation because of such silly utterances. Baudelaire, patterning after Poe and Bertrand, fashioned poems in prose and created images of beauty; following him Huysmans added a novel nuance and made the form still more concentrated. But Signor Marinetti—there are no ideas in his prose and his images are nil—writes as if he were using a cable code, a crazy one at that. How far he is responsible for the "Æsthetic" of the Futurist art I don't know. If he is responsible at all then he has worked much mischief, for several of the five painters are men of unquestionable ability, skilled brush workers and of an artistic sincerity that is without suspicion. Mind you, I don't say all of the groups; there are charlatans who hang on to the coat-tails of every talented man or are camp-followers in every movement. These five painters: Umberto Boccioni (Milan); Carlo D. Carra (Milan); Luigi Russolo (Milan); Giacomo Balla (Rome), and Gino Severini (Paris) do not paint for money. The pictures in this exhibition are not for sale; indeed, I doubt if the affair pays expenses, for it has travelled far; from Turin and Milan and Rome, to Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam. It will be in New York soon, and then look out for a repetition of the Playboy of the Western World scandal. Some of the pictures are very provocative.

Naturally the antithesis of old and new was unescapable the chilly September afternoon that I entered the "Roos" gallery. Fresh from The Milk Jug, that miracle in paint by Vermeer (formerly of the Jan Six Collection); from the Rembrandt Night Watch (which was not much damaged by the maniac who slashed the right knee of the principal figure); from the two or three splendid portraits by Frans Hals; from the Elizabeth Bas and the Stallmeesters by Rembrandt—from all these masterpieces of great paint, poetry, humour, humanity, I confess the transition to the wild and whirling kaleidoscopes called pictures by these ferocious Futurists was too sudden for my eyes and understanding. It was some time before I could orient myself optically. If you have ever peered through one of those pasteboard cylinders dear to childhood, you will catch a tithe of my early sensations. All that I had read of the canvases was mere colourless phrase-making. After the first shudder had passed, the magnetism, a hideous magnetism, drew you to the walls, the lunatic patterns began to yield up vague meanings; arabesques that threatened one's sanity became almost intelligible. The yelling walls seemed to sing more in tune, the flaring tones softened a trifle, there was method in all this madness and presently you discovered that there was more method than madness, and that way critical madness lay. You are not in the least converted to this arbitrary and ignominious splashing of raw tints, but you are interested—you linger, you study and then you fall to reading the philosophy of the movement. It is the hour of your apÉritive, l'heure exquise, when you take your departure, and out on the noisy Rokindam, not far from the Central railway station, you rub your eyes and then note that the very chaos you resented in the canvases of the Futurists is in the streets—which are being repaved. Snorting motor-cars and rumbling busses go by, people seem to be walking up inclined planes, the houses lean over and their windows leer and beckon to you; the sky is like a stage cloth and sweeps the roofs; you hurry to your hotel and in strong tea you drown your memories of the Italian Futurists.

It is only fair to give their side of the case. This I shall condense, as the exuberant lyricism and defiant dithyramb soon became monotonous. They write like very young and enthusiastic chaps, and they are for the most part mature men and experienced painters. Luckily for their public, Signor Marinetti and his friends did not adopt his Siamese telegraphic style in their printed programme. They begin by stating that they will sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. The essential elements of their poetry will be courage, daring, and rebellion. Literature has hitherto glorified serene immobility, ecstasy, and sleep; they will extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. They declare that the world's splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car, its frame adorned by great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath, a roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre. Note just here the speed-mania motive. There is no more beauty except in strife. No masterpiece without aggressiveness. Poetry must be a violent onslaught upon the unknown forces, commanding them to bow before man. Now there is nothing particularly new in this. Great poetry is dynamic as it is also reflective (the Futurists call the latter "static"). They say they stand on the extreme promontory of the centuries. Why, they ask, should we look behind us, when we have to break into the mysterious portals of the impossible? Time and space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have already created speed, eternal and ever present. This rigmarole of metaphysics betrays the influence of the Henri Bergson philosophy, the philosophy of rhythm and rhythmic motion. It is just as original; i. e., not original at all. Mother Earth is still spinning through space at the gait originally imparted to her by the sun's superior force. Mankind on her outer rind spins with her. Because we have invented steam and electric cars, we must not arrogate to ourselves the discovery of speed. What has speed to do with painting on a flat surface, painting in two dimensions of space? Wait a bit! We are coming to the application of rhythm to paint.

The Futurists wish to glorify war—the only health-giver of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, the contempt for woman. They wish to destroy the museums, the libraries (unlucky Mr. Carnegie!), to fight moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian measures. Museums are for them cemeteries of art; to admire an old picture is to pour our sensitiveness into a funeral urn, instead of casting it forward in violent gushes of creation and action. So set fire to the shelves of libraries! Deviate the course of canals to flood the cellars of museums! Seize pickaxes and hammers! Sap the foundations of the antique cities! "We stand upon the summit of the world and once more we cast our challenge to the stars." Thus F. T. Marinetti, editor of Poesia.

The manifesto of the new crowd is too lengthy to reproduce; but here are a few of its tenets:

1st: That imitation must be despised, and all originality glorified. (How novel!)

2d: That it is essential to rebel against the tyranny of the terms "harmony" and "good taste" as being too elastic expressions, by the help of which it is easy to demolish the works of Rembrandt, of Goya, and of Rodin.

3d: That the art-critics are useless or harmful.

4th: That all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever, and of speed.

5th: That the name of "madman" with which it is attempted to gag all innovators, should be looked upon as a title of honour. 6th: That innate complementariness is an absolute necessity in painting, just as free metre in poetry or polyphony in music. Oh, ass who wrote this! Polyphony is not a modern invention. A man named Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, wrote fugues of an extraordinary beauty and clearness in their most complicated polyphony. But polyphony (or many voices) is new in painting, and to the Futurists must be conceded the originality of attempting to represent a half dozen different things at the same time on canvas—a dog's tail, a woman's laughter, the thoughts of a man who has had a "hard night," the inside of a motor-bus, and the ideas of its passengers concerning its bumping wheels, and what-not!

7th: That universal dynamism must be rendered in painting as a dynamic sensation.

8th: That in the manner of rendering nature, the essential is sincerity and purity (more copy-book maxims for us!).

9th: That movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies (a truism in art well known to Watteau, Rembrandt, Turner, and latterly, to Claude Monet and the earlier group of Impressionists). And now for the milk in the cocoanut.

We fight, concludes the manifesto: 1st: Against the bituminous tints by which it is attempted to obtain the patina of tone upon modern pictures. (The chief objection against this statement is its absolute superfluousness. The Impressionists forty years ago attacked bituminous painting and finally drove it out; now it is coming back as a novelty. The Futurists are gazing backward.) 2d: Against the superficial and elementary archaism founded upon flat tints, which, by imitating the linear technique of the Egyptians, reduces painting to a powerless synthesis both childish and grotesque. 3d: Against the false claims of belonging to the future put forward by the Secessionists and the Independents, who have installed new academies no less trite and attached to routine than the preceding ones. 4th: We demand for ten years the total suppression of the nude in painting.

There are thirty-four pictures in the show, the catalogue of which is a curiosity. Boccioni's The Street Enters the Home has a note in the catalogue which points out that the painter does not limit himself to what he sees in the square frame of the window as would a simple photographer, but he also reproduces what he would see by looking out on every side from the balcony. Isn't this lucid? But you ought to see the jumble in the canvas caused by the painter casting aside the chief prerogative of an artist, the faculty of selection, or, rather, as Walter Pater puts it, the "tact of omission."

There is the motion of moonlight in one canvas and in No. 24, by Russolo, entitled Rebellion, there is an effort to delineate—better say express, as the art of delineation is here in abeyance—the collision of two forces, that of the revolutionary element made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism against the force of inertia and reactionary resistance of tradition. The angles are the vibratory waves of the former force in motion. The perspective of the houses is destroyed just as a boxer is bent double by receiving a blow in the wind (refined image!). As this picture is purely symbolical, it is not open to objections; but isn't it rather amusing?

Memory of a Night, by Russolo (No. 23), is "a fantastic impression produced not by line but by colour." An elongated insect or snail—is it a man or a grasshopper?—is in the first plane; back of him is a girl's face with pleading eyes; an explosion of light in the background is evidently intended for an electric lamp; the rest is chaos.

The Milliner (No. 32) by Severini, the painter calls: "An arabesque of the movement produced by the twinkling colours and iridescence of the frills and furbelows on show; the electric light divides the scene into defined zones. A study of simultaneous penetration." The deathly grin of the modiste is about the only "simultaneous penetration" that I could see in the canvas.

As confused as is No. 27, The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico, by Severini, there are some vital bits, excellent modelling, striking detail, though as a whole, it is hard to unravel; the point d'appui is missing; the interest is nowhere focussed, though the dancer woman soon catches the eye. No doubt a crowded supper room in a Continental cafÉ, the white napery, variegated colours of the women's attire, the movement and blinding glare of the lights are a chaotic blur when you first open your eyes upon them; but the human eye with its almost infinite capacity for adaptation soon resolves disorder into order, formlessness into form. The trouble with the Futurist is that he catches the full force of the primal impression, then later loads it with his own subjective fancies. The outcome is bound to be a riddle.

I confess without hesitation there are several pictures in the exhibition which impressed me. Power is power, no matter the strange airs it may at times assume. Browning's Sordello, despite its numerous obscure passages, is withal a work of high purpose, it always stirs the imagination. I found myself staring at CarrÀ's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli and wondering after all whether a conflict shouldn't be represented in a conflicting manner. Zola reproached both De Goncourt and Flaubert for their verbal artistry. "Vulgar happenings," he said, "should be presented in the bluntest fashion." And then he contradicted himself in practice by attempting to write like Hugo and Flaubert. Signor CarrÀ, who probably witnessed the street row at the funeral of Galli between the students and the police, sets before us in all its vivacity or rhythm—or rhythms—the fight. It is a real fight. And while I quite agree with Edgar Degas, who said he could make a crowd out of four or five figures in a picture, it is no reflection on CarrÀ's power to do the same with a dozen or more. A picture as full of movement and the clash of combatants as is the battle section of the Richard Strauss Symphony, A Hero's Life. Realism is the dominating factor in both works. The cane and club swinging sympathisers of the anarchist are certainly vital.

In what then consists the originality of the Futurists? Possibly their blatant claim to originality. The Primitives, Italian and Flemish, saw the universe with amazing clearness; their pictorial metaphysics was clarity itself; their mysticism was never muddy; all nature was settled, serene, and brilliantly silhouetted. But mark you! they, too, enjoyed depicting a half-dozen happenings on the same canvas. Fresh from a tour through the galleries of Holland, Belgium, and France, after a special study of the Primitives, I quite understand what the Futurists are after. They emulate the innocence of the eye characteristic of the early painters, but despite their strong will they cannot recover the blitheness and sweetness, the native wood-note wild, nor recapture their many careless moods. They weave the pattern closer, seeking to express in paint a psychology that is only possible in literature. And they endeavour to imitate music with its haunting suggestiveness, its thematic vagueness, its rhythmic swiftness and splendour of tonalities. In vain. No picture can spell many moods simultaneously, nor paint soul-states successively within one frame. These painters have mistaken their vocation. They should have been musicians or writers, or handle the more satisfactory, if less subtle, cinematograph.

Will there ever be a new way of seeing as well as representing life, animate and inanimate? Who shall say? The Impressionists, working on hints from Watteau, Rembrandt, Turner, gave us a fresh view of the universe. Rhythm in art is no new thing. In the figures of El Greco as in the prancing horses of GÉricault, rhythm informs every inch of the canvas. The Futurists are seeking a new synthesis, and their work is far from synthetic; it is decomposition—in the painter's sense of the word—carried to the point of distraction. Doubtless each man has a definite idea when he takes up his brush, but all the king's horses and all the king's men can't make out that idea when blazoned on the canvas. The Futurists may be for the future, but not for to-day's limited range of vision.