It would not be difficult to pick out among one’s business acquaintances those who are conservative, that is, academic, and those who are inventive, speculative, venturesome, and so on to the “wild enthusiasts,” “crazy fellows,” who are always doing the unexpected; failing often but sometimes succeeding so brilliantly the world follows in their footsteps.
There is nothing strange about the Cubists—except their pictures. Their pictures strike us as strange because we do not understand them, but if they were simply trying to do what thousands of inventors are trying to do the world over, namely, devise something new to meet the needs of mankind we would laugh at them no more than—and just as much as—the world laughed at the Wright brothers when they were working on the flying machine.
There are romanticists, realists, impressionists, futurists, cubists, in the theater.
The romantic play is an old, but still delightful story. We have had realism on the stage so long it has become almost academic. Just now there is coming from the Scandinavian countries and from Germany and Russia a form of dramatic representation that is essentially Cubist, Futurist, and Orphist in its expression.[33]
This ferment of new ideas is very disturbing to men who are afraid of change, who favor things as they are, who like to go to bed at the same hour and get up at the same hour, to do today what they did yesterday. But the new ideas will not down; they are constantly breaking out in unexpected places and while they may seem to be different ideas when expressed in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture, from those expressed in science, religion, politics, social reform, and business generally, they are not; they are all fundamentally the same, namely, they are the ideas of a progress so rapid and radical it may be revolutionary and in a measure destructive.
In the very nature of things it is not given to many men to be receptive to new ideas in many lines, for that implies thinking for themselves in many lines. The more intense and advanced a man is in one line of thought, the more apt he is to accept ready made the ideas of others in other subjects. It is a saving of time for the radical scientist to accept his politics and religion ready made from those who devote their time to those matters—the scientist does not always do so, but often when he thinks he is asserting his independence by rejecting current beliefs he is doing so without any real ideas and convictions of his own.
