idea of beauty with the idea of woman. We are at the end of that period.
“Woman as the center, the obsession has already gone out of poetry. As a leit-motif she has no longer the same force; other problems have taken her place. According to our view, poetry is nothing but a more intense, a more exalted, life—and that is why we combat the constant intrusion into it of the ‘domestic triangle’ in various forms, and which has been its ruin.
“Now, Futurists are found everywhere. In England you have H. G. Wells. We all realize the need to be more rapid, more intense, more essential, and though our method of expression has been stigmatized as ‘telegraphic lyricism’ I take no exception to that so long as it makes people talk and brings them to examine our underlying rules of action.
“Art, either plastic or active, is not a religion. It is the best part of our strength, of our physiological being. It is, in consequence, absurd to consider it as a system, as something to worship with joined hands; it should express all the intensity of life—its beauty, greatness, its fire, its brutality, its sordidness.
“Futurism in poetry represents a realism profound, rapid, intense—the very complex of our life of today.”
XII
VIRILE-IMPRESSIONISM
WHAT is happening in America? Exactly what might be expected in a young, vigorous, and virile country.
America has been keenly susceptible to art influences from every section. Her students are everywhere, her exhibitions are gathered from the four quarters of the globe. She is very much alive to what Europe is doing, she has long been interested in what China and Japan have done.
While her art is in the main conservative, it is not the conservatism of stubbornness or stolidity, it is rather the conservatism of isolation; but her isolation is a thing of the past. Communication is so frequent, travel so easy, transportation so cheap, that both art and artists flow hither and thither almost unrestricted.
In spite of this freedom of inter-communication, the development of American art has been along independent lines—at least along one independent line, a line so individual in its characteristics it deserves the name American-Impressionism, or, more generically, Virile-Impressionism.