“If we take a half-tone engraving and examine it with a magnifying glass we find it is a series of holes of uniform size but more or less dense on the surface according to the requirements of light, shade and line. Magnify a half-tone 100 times and we have a large grating of black and white circles or squares. That is cubist art. It requires a slight shift in the point of view, a little development and stimulation of the imagination—nothing more.
“When Gulliver visited the Brobdingnagians and viewed the complexions of their women at close range, it almost made him sick—yet they were noted beauties. He looked too close. When they looked at him they observed no complexion—they looked too far. Yet each had a concrete complexion and the only trouble was the point of view and the shock of comparison.
“The futurists have a very novel and, at this time, an outlandish art. One of them has a full page picture used as an advertisement of the peculiar sound of a horn. It is a picture of a sound that saws its way through other sounds. There is a straight, fan-like picture for a constant, augmenting note, rising in scale. It is gray. There is a black ellipse for a loud varying noise of fairly regular variation of note, and so on. The foreign noise of the horn is shown as utterly unlike in form, intensity, regularity or harmony, any other sound.
“If one has a diagram one can understand the futurist art and, when one understands, he approves. The new arts are simply aids to comparison, discrimination and inspiration. They have all the delights of wine-tasting or salad-judging—and some salads are vile.
“The color musician has developed only another exercise in discrimination. If we were to make mathematics of music we would find that there is an exact relation between the number of vibrations of notes an octave apart; a constant relation between the vibrations in the natural and the sharp; a direct ratio between the vibrations of the notes in a chord; a formula for harmony and another for discord. It is an interesting mathematical study, a science as well as an art, and it proves that our appreciation through the senses is based on natural mathematical sequences and on well understood ratios, seasoned for variety’s sake by divergences from type.
“Now the color musician has taken the spectrum and made notes out of it like the notes on the gamut. He has a color-scale and can do as much on it for the delight of the eye as a musician can with the musical scale for the ear. He merely brings out an extra way of enjoying distinctions and of enjoying that most restful of enjoyable things—conventionality. The certainty and the satisfaction of the conventional is about the most assuring thing in all experience. There is no more steadying feeling in all the world than to know that two and two make four, and that c-a-t spells cat. The more ways by which we can be assured of the belief we hold by faith, that there is an uniform, unchanging, all-pervading rule in the world, arguing an individual, mastering central consciousness and direction, the happier we are.
“The cubists and the futurists and the color musicians may be faddists, but they help to drive out old Solomon’s pessimism. They help us to understand by purely human experience how it is that there may be some things which even humans cannot understand—but which are.”