fighting men and horses ought to be
represented, but he had this detached curiosity about all things.
Michelangelo's battle picture, also lost, expressed his interest in the
nude in violent action, like his picture of the "Last Judgment."
Titian's "Battle of Cadore," which we know from the copy of a fragment
of it, was a landscape with figures in violent action. Tintoret's battle
scenes are parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his hunting scenes
or his Bacchanals, expressions of his own overweening energy. In none of
these, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there implied any criticism of
war, or any sense that it is an abnormal activity of man. The men who
take part in it are just men fighting; they are not men seen differently
because they are fighting, or in any way robbed of their humanity
because of their inhuman business. As for Meissonier, he paints a battle
scene just as if he were a second-rate Dutchman painting a _genre_
picture; and most other modern military painters make merely a patriotic
appeal. War to them also is a normal occupation; and they paint battle
pictures as they might paint sporting pictures, because there is a
public that likes them.

In Mr. Nevinson's war pictures there is expressed a modern sense of war
as an abnormal occupation; and this sense shows itself in the very
method of the artist. He was something of a Cubist before the war; but
in these pictures he has found a new reason for being one; for his
cubist method does express, in the most direct way, his sense that in
war man behaves like a machine or part of a machine, that war is a
process in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in a
great instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person and
is lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repetition and sharp
distinction of planes, expresses this sense of mechanical process better
than any other way of representation. Perhaps it came into being to
express the modern sense of process as the ultimate reality of all
things, even of life and growth. This is the age of mechanism; and
machines have affected even our view of the universe; we are overawed by
our own knowledge and inventions. Samuel Butler imagined a future in
which machines would come to life and make us their slaves; but it is
not so much that machines have come to life as that we ourselves have
lost the pride and sweetness of our humanity; not that the machines seem
more and more like