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But this adventure he quickly, and wisely, abandoned; the problems of Cubism could have helped him nothing to materialize his peculiar sensibility. And this sensibility this peculiar emotional reaction to what he sees is his great gift. No one ever felt for the visible universe just what Matisse feels; or, if one did, he could not create an equivalent.
And then, quite suddenly, he grew dissatisfied; he felt himself cramped and confined within intolerably narrow limitations. He was humiliated to find how few and crude and uninteresting were the forms he could invent; the inventions of nature were without number, inconceivably subtle and elaborate. He had done with cubism. He was out on the other side.
However pedantic and ridiculous its transformation of drawing, it yet recognizes the existence of drawing. Therefore, to the Futurist, Cubism is reactionary. What difference does it make, he asks, whether you draw a head round or square? Why draw a head at all? The Futurist denies the fundamental postulates of the art of painting.
And I believe it is in revolt against, perhaps in terror of, this profoundly un-French spirit that the younger Frenchmen are seeking shelter and grace under the vast though unconscious nationalism of Derain. For the French have never loved Cubism, though Braque uses it beautifully. How should they love anything so uncongenial to their temperament?
More than ever before "To have done is to hang quite out of fashion," and the only title to consideration is to do something quite obviously new or to proclaim one's intention of doing something newer. The race grows madder and madder. It was scarce two years since we first heard of "Cubism" when the "Futurists" were calling the "Cubists" reactionary.
This is pretty much what I think of Cubism; but I am not such a fool as to deny that, experimenting in these very problems which seem to me to lead most artists into a rather unprofitable world of abstractions, Picasso and Braque have produced works of the greatest beauty and significance, while those of Fernand Léger, Jean Metsinger, and other avowed Cubists are of extraordinary merit and deserve the most careful attention.
But, if you believe in process rather than in person, you will see your passions as part of the process and glorify them when you think you are glorifying the nature of the universe. Cubism and all those new methods of art which subject facts to the tyranny of a process may be good satire, but they will never, I think, produce an independent beauty of their own.
During the last eight years, nearly half of which had been spent in the process of winning the war, he had worked his way industriously through cubism. Now he had come out on the other side.
Of Cubism I have said my say elsewhere: if I have some doubts as to whether, as a complete theory of painting, it has a future, I have none that what it has already achieved is remarkable. Also, I recognize its importance as a school of experiments, some of which are sure to bear fruit and leave a mark on history.
That is one reason why I cannot think that there is any great future for Cubism. An artistic movement is unlikely to live long on anything so relevant to art; for artists, it seems, must believe that they are concerned with something altogether different.
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