with politics is always a mistake. Futurist
pictures are descriptive because they aim at presenting in line and
colour the chaos of the mind at a particular moment; their forms are not
intended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information. These
forms, by the way, whatever may be the nature of the ideas they suggest,
are themselves anything but revolutionary. In such Futurist pictures as
I have seen--perhaps I should except some by Severini--the drawing,
whenever it becomes representative as it frequently does, is found to be
in that soft and common convention brought into fashion by Besnard some
thirty years ago, and much affected by Beaux-Art students ever since. As
works of art, the Futurist pictures are negligible; but they are not to
be judged as works of art. A good Futurist picture would succeed as a
good piece of psychology succeeds; it would reveal, through line and
colour, the complexities of an interesting state of mind. If Futurist
pictures seem to fail, we must seek an explanation, not in a lack of
artistic qualities that they never were intended to possess, but rather
in the minds the states of which they are intended to reveal.

Most people who care much about art find that of the work that moves
them most the greater part is what scholars call "Primitive." Of course
there are bad primitives. For instance, I remember going, full of
enthusiasm, to see one of the earliest Romanesque churches in Poitiers
(Notre-Dame-la-Grande), and finding it as ill-proportioned,
over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy as any better class building by
one of those highly civilised architects who flourished a thousand years
earlier or eight hundred later. But such exceptions are rare. As a rule
primitive art is good--and here again my hypothesis is helpful--for, as
a rule, it is also free from descriptive qualities. In primitive art you
will find no accurate representation; you will find only significant
form. Yet no other art moves us so profoundly. Whether we consider
Sumerian sculpture or pre-dynastic Egyptian art, or archaic Greek, or
the Wei and T'ang masterpieces,[1] or those early Japanese works of
which I had the luck to see a few superb examples (especially two
wooden Bodhisattvas) at the Shepherd's Bush Exhibition in 1910, or
whether, coming nearer home, we consider the primitive Byzantine art of
the sixth century and its primitive developments amongst the Western
barbarians, or, turning far afield, we consid