kip the numerous devil's laboratories wherever people are
being stewed or sawn asunder, also the scenes of men whipped with
leather thongs or broken on the rack. One picture is called The
Finger. An aged man in night-dress cowers against the wall of his
bedroom and gazes with horror at an enormous index-finger which, with
the hand to which it is attached, has crawled across the floor as
would a devilfish, or some such sort of monster. The finger
threateningly points to the unhappy person. Unquestionably it
symbolises a guilty conscience. Franz von Stuck has left his
impression on Kubin. He portrays mounds of corpses, the fruit of war,
which revolt the spectator, both on account of the folly and crime
suggested and the morbid taste of the artist.

Kubin's Salome is the last word in the interpretation of that
mellifluous damsel. It is a frank caricature of Beardsley, partially
nude, the peculiar quality of the plate being the bestial expression
of the face. No viler ugliness is conceivable. And, according to
Flaubert, who created the "modern" Salome, she was fascinating in her
beauty. I fancy foul is fair nowadays in art. Never before in its
history has there been paid such a tribute to sheer ugliness. Never
before has its house been so peopled by the seven devils mentioned in
the Good Book.

In the domain of fantasy Kubin is effective. A lonely habitation set
in nocturnal gloom with a horde of rats deserting it, is atmospheric;
two groups of men quarrelling in sinister alleys, monks of the
Inquisition extinguishing torches in a moonlit corridor, or a white
nightmare nag wildly galloping in a circular apartment; these betray
fancy, excited perhaps by drugs. When in 1900 or thereabouts the
"decadence" movement swept artistic Germany, the younger men imitated
Poe and Baudelaire, and consumed opium with the hope that they might
see and record visions. But a commonplace brain under the influence of
opium or hasheesh has commonplace dreams. To few is accorded by nature
(or by his satanic majesty) the dangerous privilege of discerning
la-bas, those visions described by De Quincey, Poe, or De Nerval.
Alfred Kubin has doubtless experienced the rapture of the initiate.
There is a certain plate in which a figure rushes down the secret
narrow pathway zigzagging from the still stars to the bottommost pit
of hell, the head crowned as if by a flaming ecstasy, the arms
extended in hysteria, the feet of abnormal size. A thrilling desig