re is no victory that man has
yet been able to achieve over matter that he does not before long
discover has merely delivered him into a new servitude.

XXVI

THE FUTURISTS

The appearance of the first number of _Blast_ ought to put an end to
the Futurist movement in England. One can forgive a new movement for
anything except being tedious: _Blast_ is as tedious as an attempt to
play Pistol by someone who has no qualification for the part, but whom
neither friends nor the family clergyman can persuade into the decency
of silence. It may be urged that _Blast_ does not represent Futurism,
but Vorticism. But, after all, what is Vorticism but Futurism in an
English disguise--Futurism, one might call it, bottled in England, and
bottled badly? One has only to compare the pictures of the Vorticists
recently shown at the Goupil Gallery with the pictures of the Italian
Futurists which are being shown at the Dore to see that the two groups
differ from each other not in their aims, but in their degrees of
competence. No one going through the gallery of Italian paintings and
sculpture could fail to see that Boccioni, with all his freakishness,
his hideousness, his discordant introduction of real hair, glass eyes,
and so forth into his statuary, is an artist powerful both in
imagination and in technique. His study of a woman in a balcony is of
a kind to bring an added horror into a night of human sacrifices in
the Congo. His representation of Matter destroys the appetite like a
nightmare that has escaped from the obscene bowels of the sea. It
produces, one cannot deny, an emotional effect, like some loathsome
and shapeless thing. Compare with it most of the work that is being
done in England under Futurist inspiration and you will see the
immense difference in mere power. How seldom, apart from the work of
Mr Nevinson and one or two others, one finds among the latter a
picture that is more interesting to the imagination than a metal
toast-rack! You see a picture that looks like a badly opened
sardine-tin, and you discover that it is called "Portrait of Mother
and Infant." You see another that looks as if someone had taken a pair
of scissors and cut a Union Jack into squares and triangles, and had
then rearranged the pieces at random in a patchwork quilt, and this,
in turn, is labelled, say, "Tennyson reading _In Memoriam_ to Queen
Victoria." In either case, if the thing were done once, it might be
funny. But the young ar