rtheless, a more rigid discipline might have smoothed the way for
Kubin, who has not yet mastered the tools of his art. He has always
practised his scales in public.

A man's reading proclaims the man. Kubin's favourite authors for years
were Schopenhauer and Mainlaender, the latter a disciple of the mighty
Arthur and one who put into practice a tenet of his master, for he
attained Nirvana by his own hand.

Now, a little Schopenhauer is an excellent thing to still restless,
egotistic spirits, to convince them of the essential emptiness of
life's coveted glories; but a surfeit of Schopenhauer is like a
surfeit of lobster--mental indigestion follows and the victim blames
the lobster (_i. e._, life) instead of his own inordinate appetite.
Throughout Kubin's work I detect traces of spleen, hatred of life,
delight in hideous cruelty, a predisposition to obscurity and a
too-exclusive preoccupation with sex; indeed, sex looms largest in the
consciousness of the new art.

To burlesque the human figure, to make of it a vile arabesque, a
shameful sight, is the besetting temptation of the younger generation.
Naturally, it is good to get away from the saccharine and the rococo,
but vulgarity is always vulgarity and true art is never vulgar.
However, Kubin has plenty of precedents. A ramble through any
picture-gallery on the Continent will prove that human nature was the
same five hundred years ago as it was in the Stone Age, as it is
to-day, as it always will be. Some of Rembrandt's etched plates are
unmentionable, and Goya even went to further lengths.

Now, Kubin is a lineal descendant of this Spaniard, minus his genius,
for our young man is not a genius, despite his cleverness. He
burlesques the themes of Goya at times, and in him there is more than
a streak of the cruelty which causes such a painful impression when
viewing the Proverbs or the Disasters of War.

Kubin has chosen to seek earlier than Goya for his artistic
nourishment. He has studied the designs of the extraordinary Pieter
Breughel, and so we get modern versions of the bizarre events in daily
life so dear to old Pieter. On one plate Kubin depicts a hundred
happenings. Cruelty and broad humour are present and not a little
ingenuity in the weaving of the pattern. He, too, like Breughel, is
fond of trussing up a human as if he were a pig and then sticking him
with a big knife. Every form of torture from boiling oil to retelling
a stale anecdote is shown. The el