ent beauty of their own. Like all satire, they are
parasitic upon past art, negative and rebellious. They tell us what the
universe may look like to us if we lose all faith in ourselves and each
other; and, when they are the result of a desperate effort to see the
universe so, they are unconscious satire. The complete, convinced cubist
reduces his own method, his own beliefs, his own state of mind, to an
absurdity. The more sincere he is, the more complete is the reduction.
For he, rejecting all that has been the subject-matter of painting in
the past, all the human values and the complexes of association which
have invested the visible world with beauty for men, proves to us in his
tortured diagrams that he has found nothing to take their place, He
gives us a _Chimaera bombinans in vacuo_, that vacuum which the universe
is to the human spirit when it denies itself. He tries to make art,
having cut himself off from all the experience and belief that produce
art. For art springs always out of a supreme value for the personal and
is an expression of that value. It is an effort, no matter in what
medium, to find the personal in all things, to see trees as men walking;
and the new abstract methods in painting reverse this process, they
empty all things, even men, of personality and subject them to a process
invented by the artist, which expresses, if it expresses anything, his
own loss of personal values and nothing else. The result may be
ingenious, it may still have a kind of beauty remembered from the great
design of past art; but it will lead nowhere, since it is cut off from
the very experience, the passionate personal interest in people and
things, which gave design to the great art of the past. It is at best
satirical, at worst parasitic, using up all devices of design and
turning from one to another in a restless ennui which of itself can give
no enrichment. It may have its uses, since it insists upon the supreme
importance of design and provides a new method for the expression of
three dimensions; but this method will be barren unless those who
practise it enrich it with their own observation and delight. Already
some of them seem to be weary of the barrenness of pure abstraction;
they see that any fool can hide his own commonplace in cubism as an
ostrich hides its head in the sand; but we would rather have honest
chocolate-box ladies than the kaleidoscopic but betraying chocolate-box
fragments of the futurist.