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