The most interesting hours of the last week I have spent in listening to discussions of the futurists. Someone told of a superb incident recently reported of a speech by Marinetti, the enunciator of the futurist philosophy. Marinetti, after denouncing the past in his usual method, proceeded to eliminate women from his world. “But,” said someone, “how will you continue the human race?” “We will not continue the human race,” rejoined Marinetti, with superb éclat. Daring and magnificent utterance! But, after all, perhaps he is the only sane one, and the norm of human intelligence quite insane. That fits in well with the recently reported discovery of a Paris scientist, that all variations in the course of evolution are the result of disease, and that there would have been no man had not some ape had a parasite in his thyroid gland. All of which goes to show that I was right in my statement (which Chesterton probably has said before me) that all logical extremes are illogical, since the world is based on an eternal paradox.
Really it is quite simple to follow the futurist line of thought once you get the hang of it. For instance—two developments of painting predicted at the Troubetzkoys. In the first, each plane in the cubist picture, instead of being colored, is to be numbered, and the numbers printed in a catalogue opposite the names of the colors for which they stand. Thus any approach to the vulgar intrusion of realism would be avoided, and abstract beauty furthered. What chances for the imagination! And think of the subtle possibilities in the mathematics of color! One could surely express by some abstruse quadratic a color quite beyond the realm of visual possibility, and thus man by one gigantic tug at his bootstraps would pull his soul out of its finite limitations.
The second school was aptly named the auto-symbolists. In this school Nietzschean individualism attains its sublime extreme. The artist, instead of expressing his spirit in the vulgar symbols understood by everybody, arbitrarily chooses a symbol known only to himself. If he wishes to depict a determined man going up a mountain on a mule’s back he may paint a mouse-trap. To him the mouse-trap perfectly expresses the particular feeling he has when viewing his own mental image of the picture he has decided to paint. What matter about anybody else? If you ask him cui bono?—he will reply: why any bono at all? And, of course, he is perfectly logical. And the satisfying aristocratic aloofness of his position! If people—as they surely will—study his mouse-trap and discuss in vain what it portends, if they pay vast sums for his pictures and start a literature of criticisms to guess his unguessable riddles, so much the better. He can laugh at them with diabolical glee. Everybody is a fool but himself, and he can go on creating in the seventh circle of his own soul undisturbed by the barnyard cackle of the world.
Has the cubist literature of Gertrude Stein awakened echoes in Chicago? I have read it without understanding before this. But one night my host—a great, strong, humorous, intelligent hulk of a man, himself a scoffer at cubism—read part of her essay on Matisse so that it was almost intelligible. His inflection and punctuation did it. Her chief characteristics seem to be an aversion to personal pronouns and a strict adherence to simple declarative statements, untroubled by subordinate clauses or phrases of any kind. Her thought, therefore, resolves itself awkwardly in a four-square way. The multiplicity of her planes becomes confusing after a page, but each plane stands alone. Thus—(I quote inaccurately)—“Some ones knew this one to be expressing something being struggling. Some ones knew this one not to be expressing something being struggling. This one expressed something being struggling. This one did not express something being struggling.” Which, of course, is the cubist way of saying that “Some thought he was trying to express struggle in an object, others thought the contrary. As a matter of fact, he sometimes did express struggle; sometimes he did not.”
But it seems her early work is now getting too obvious, so she is in the throes of a later phase. In her “Portrait of Miss Dodge” she has eliminated verbs and sentence structure entirely, flinging a succession of image-nouns at the reader. One can surely not accuse her of “prettiness.”
The craze for colored wigs is, of course, an outgrowth of futurism. Why should a man be any color except that which his will dictates? This has long (a few months) been the cry of the painter, and the smart set has echoed: Why should he? Women in green and blue wigs have been seen in New York already. But, of course, it would be senseless to stop there; if one has an orange toupé he should surely have a mauve face. Yellow complexions are worn with indigo hair. We have long been accustomed to blue powdered noses on Fifth Avenue, and the setting of diamonds in the teeth is an old story. The only trouble with this epoch-making idea is that it is old. Phœnician women did it! And wasn’t it Edward Lear who wrote of The Jumblies:
“Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve”?
Of course, if one doesn’t believe in this new development of art, but is naturalistic, he should be brave enough to chase his idea to its lair and act upon it, like Lady Constance Stewart Richardson, who is now tripping about the homes of the rich in New York with nothing at all on—or worse than nothing.
Forgive my preposterosities! But the ridiculous seriousness with which everything unfamiliar is taken by a sensation-sated haute monde is such a brilliant target for satire. I think with immense relief of a wonderful bit of sky, and a long stretch of beach, and of all things tangible and—yes, though it may be bourgeois—healthy.