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 Carra'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 Carra, 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 Carra'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