has treated each picture as seen at a specific instant of time.  Futurism attempts systematically to combine the past and the future with the present, as if all the pictures in a cinematograph film were to be printed one over the other; to paint no instant but to represent the movement of time.  It aims at nothing less than the abrogation of all recognized laws, the total destruction of all that has hitherto passed for art.

Do you recall the story of the man who tried to count a litter of pigs, but gave it up because one little pig ran about so fast that he could not be counted?  One finds oneself in somewhat the same predicament when one tries to describe these “new movements” in art.  The movement is so rapid and the men shift their ground so quickly that there is no telling where to find them.  You have no sooner arrived at some notion of the difference between Cubism and Futurism than you find your Cubist doing things that are both Cubist and Futurist, or neither Cubist nor Futurist, according as you look at them.  You find things made up of geometrical figures to give volume, yet with all the parts many times repeated to give motion.  You find things that have neither bulk nor motion but look like nothing so much as a box of Chinese tangrams scattered on a table.  Finally, you have assemblages of lines that do not draw anything, even cubes or triangles; and we are assured that there is now a newest school of all, called Orphism, which, finding still some vestiges of intelligibility in any assemblage of lines, reduces everything to shapeless blotches.  Probably the first of Orphic pictures was that produced by the quite authentic donkey who was induced to smear a canvas by lashing a tail duly dipped in paint.  It was given a title as Orphic as the painting, was accepted by a jury anxious to find new forms of talent, and was hung in the Salon d’Automne.

In all this welter of preposterous theories there is but one thing constant—­one thing on which all these theorists are agreed.  It is that all this strange stuff is symbolic and shadows forth the impressions and emotions of the artist:  represents not nature but his feeling about nature; is the expression of his mind or, as they prefer to call it, his soul.  It may be so.  All art is symbolic; images are symbols; words are symbols; all communication is by symbols.  But if a symbol is to serve any purpose of communication between one mind and another it must be a symbol accepted and understood by both minds.  If an artist is to choose his symbols to suit himself, and to make them mean anything he chooses, who is to say what he means or whether he means anything?  If a man were to rise and recite, with a solemn voice, words like “Ajakan maradak tecor sosthendi,” would you know what he meant?  If he wished you to believe that these symbols express the feeling of awe caused by the contemplation of the starry heavens, he would have to tell you so in your own language;