"Goethe", by Karl Heinemann, 1899, p. 684; also Oscar Wilde, "De
Profundis"; also Delacroix, "My Diary".] New principles do not
fall from heaven, but are logically if indirectly connected with
past and future. What is important to us is the momentary
position of the principle and how best it can be used. It must
not be employed forcibly. But if the artist tunes his soul to
this note, the sound will ring in his work of itself. The
"emancipation" of today must advance on the lines of the inner
need. It is hampered at present by external form, and as that is
thrown aside, there arises as the aim of composition-
construction. The search for constructive form has produced
Cubism, in which natural form is often forcibly subjected to
geometrical construction, a process which tends to hamper the
abstract by the concrete and spoil the concrete by the abstract.

The harmony of the new art demands a more subtle construction
than this, something that appeals less to the eye and more to the
soul. This "concealed construction" may arise from an apparently
fortuitous selection of forms on the canvas. Their external lack
of cohesion is their internal harmony. This haphazard arrangement
of forms may be the future of artistic harmony. Their fundamental
relationship will finally be able to be expressed in mathematical
form, but in terms irregular rather than regular.



VIII. ART AND ARTISTS