with the fierce banging of a great drum and the repeated firing of a pistol.

Bourgeois achievement destroyed, and bourgeois theory rejected, there is now the endeavour to develop a new 'dynamic monumental art' which shall suggest that material matter is not dead but should be regarded as 'the expression of the energies latent in it.' This new theory has found its easiest expression in sculpture and architecture, and all sorts of fantastic ideas have been discussed as to what material best symbolised proletarian culture. Wood has been condemned as counter-revolutionary, and Trotsky has declared that the coming age will be an age of iron, concrete, and glass. Herr FülöpMiller prints many photographs of the monstrosities that have been the result of Bolshevist imagining. Cubism is the foundation of Bolshevist art, and size is its main ambition.

Herr Fülöp-Miller says that the tragedy of all artistic measures in Soviet Russia is to be found in their impracticability. There is a great deal of talk, but very little is done. There is a great deal of enthusiasm, but little trained ability. Trotsky himself is sceptical of the possibility of any real art movement in the transitional revolutionary stage between capitalism and complete Communism. A proletarian culture, he says, does not exist and never can exist. It is the business of the revolutionists to make an end of all bourgeois culture and thus 'to prepare the way for a universal culture embracing all humanity.' But Trotsky does not even suggest what the characteristics of that universal culture are to be.

Bolshevism is a complete boulversement, actually the attempt to create the world of which Gilbert dreamed, in which 'nice is nasty, nasty nice; vice is virtue, virtue vice.' Herr Fülöp-Miller says:

'With the axiom, "Freedom is a Bourgeois prejudice," and the dogma, "Only by dictatorship can humanity be brought to happiness," a revolution took place which for ever divided the world of yesterday from the world of to-morrow. What was previously sense was now nonsense; the ideal of moral and civic freedom, previously held to be the supreme truth, dwindled into a lie: dictatorship, hitherto regarded as repulsive, now became a moral necessity. The distinction between

e

good and evil must in future be made not by feeling, but by understanding; henceforward everything practical was good and everything unpractical bad.'

But man is an irrational animal, and the failure of Bolshevism, for it must ultimately fail, will be due to the rigidity of its doctrine and the narrowness of its vision. Men are actuated, and perhaps mainly actuated, by loyalties and by passions that have no materialistic explanation and not the slightest connexion with economic circumstances. The Catholic working man prefers his Church to his class. The intensive nationalism, that has followed the Treaty of Versailles, causes persons of all classes to prefer citizenship of a small homogeneous country to citizenship of a large federation with all its obvious advantages. It is a common incident of everyday life for men-gifted men as well as foolish-as it would seem, to sacrifice everything for nothing because it is the nothing which to them is of infinite value. Human passions can be modified by intelligence, but as Prof. Laski admits, 'the modification is at the best but partial.'

Herr Fülöp-Miller suggests a comparison between the surrender of free will, demanded by the Bolshevists, and the subjection of the individual to the society, imposed on the Jesuit. The comparison is forced and misleading. The Jesuit of his own will submits himself to discipline and obedience for a great spiritual end, perhaps more completely, but in exactly the same spirit as a patriotic. soldier unhesitatingly obeys the orders of his superior officer. But the whole theory of Bolshevism demands that obedience shall be forcibly inflicted on the unwilling. At the end of his inquiry, Herr Fülöp-Miller declares that Bolshevism is a brutal despotism, and he concludes: 'Bolshevism aims at more than the confiscation of private property: it is trying to confiscate human dignity in order ultimately to turn all free reasonable beings into a horde of will-less slaves.'

The heaven of the Bolshevist is the city of Chicago, inhabited by robots.

SIDNEY DARK.

Art. 8.-PATRONAGE AND THE YOUNG ARTIST.

ONE may justly consider patronage in trying to discover some way in which the young artists of to-day may be helped to earn a living and lead a pleasant life, for it is this very important factor which most clearly distinguishes the artist of our time from the artist of any other but the prehistoric. Artists to-day have lost touch with their potential patrons, and it cannot be denied that many of them have intentionally withdrawn themselves from the society of ordinary men, to assume an attitude towards Art and Beauty which is purposely designed to mystify all but a small clique of votaries.

This movement cannot be dismissed as a mere demonstration on the part of a furious but futile minority. It is having a persistent effect on all art production and criticism. One has only to notice which exhibitions attract most attention from the critics, and what modern pictures are being added to our national collections. Art has become a mystery in the medieval sense, a guild that has evolved the most elaborate, and yet basically simple devices for the protection of its members. Probing a little into its history we may name Cézanne as one of the founders of the guild. It was Cézanne who gave artists the device, plasticity, with which to confound the lesser breeds. We may name also Van Gogh, who achieved his place through the savage vitality of his work; in his pictures the pigment itself is prodded and twisted into the semblance of the artist's vision-vision scarcely related to actuality, but revealing, with an intensity at once pathetic and appalling, the state of the artist's mind. It is self-expression carried beyond sanity. Thirdly and lastly, we may name Gauguin, who painted a vermilion dog into a certain landscape because he felt the picture needed a touch of vermilion to pull it together. By him was begotten arbitrariness, though this device is also found in the work of Van Gogh and Cézanne, both of whom in painting portraits distorted their sitters' limbs, wilfully, it is said, so that the picture might the better fit the frame.

* This may be doubted. Even Mr Roger Fry in his Cézanne: A Study of his Development (1927), has to admit that his hero manifested an

It is then these three devices, plasticity, power of self-expression, and the arbitrary use of form, which make up the main intellectual apparatus of the modern fashionable artist. Plasticity developed by a logical reductio ad absurdum into cubism, which gives us rhomboids and triangles in the place of houses and trees. Power of self-expression developed into futurism, which gives us the visual impressions passing through the artist's mind at a certain moment; it is also responsible for the childish efforts of men like the Russian, Kandinsky, who definitely calls himself an 'Expressionist.' Arbitrariness brought about the patchwork of artists such as Fernand Leger and Georges Braque. Picasso, the great experimenter, has also tried his hand at it, giving us a Harlequin whose features are a cunningly interwoven pattern of profile and full-face. Absurd this may sound, but Picasso is a man to be respected. Picasso can demand fabulous prices for his pictures. Picasso is the fashion, and any enterprising young artist who has no more originality than an ordinary professional man, does well to follow him. He will have his reward, here immediately.

But supposing our young artist sets out with the intention of preserving the finest traditions of his profession: supposing he believes his soul should rest within himself and not across the Channel in the Paris studios: supposing also he wants to make his life secure from financial worries: can we tell him he is to be envied for his vocation, or must we suggest that he relegate his artistic aspirations to his leisure hours and give up the time when work is done best to shop-walking or balancing pass-books? In other words, has the artist the same chances of making a decent living for himself as the clerk or the shop-assistant?

It may be said quite certainly that at present he has not. Now there are those who would deny the artist the right to complain of not being able to make a living. Stevenson, it will be remembered, maintained that the writer has this enormous compensation: in practising his art he is doing what he likes, whereas so many of

exceptional want of even ordinary competence in the representation of those images which his feverish imagination engendered.'

his fellows, in going through the dull routine of their particular profession or business, are doing what they thoroughly detest. And recently the Cambridge Professor of English Literature has referred to the point, with less complacence:

... As a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth.. We may prate of democracy, but actually a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.' †

In other words, if a man wish to become a successful artist, he should make his fortune first, or at any rate secure a livelihood by some other means than Art. For literary aspirants this may be good advice. Literature is wrought from experience of life and love of the power of words, and these priceless instruments of the craft are not found lying about in every study, nor even under the glowing lampshades of the British Museum Reading Room. The man who expects to see the whole of life from his study windows, the man who expects to become a great writer merely by reading great writers, neither the one nor the other has a particle of the personality of a true artist. But while one may say with truth that throughout the history of literature it is the men of affairs who have become the great men of letters, in the Fine Arts it is the man who pursues his art to the exclusion of all else who alone has a chance of attaining fame. In the glorious company of master painters there stands no imperialist-explorer like Sir Walter Raleigh, no intriguing ecclesiastic like Dean Swift. Of those who produce works of art in the time they can snatch from the earning of their daily bread we have a characteristic example in Rousseau le Douanier; and there can be no doubt that we should have more grounds for honouring William Blake and John Ruskin if they had both written less and painted more. It seems, then, that the artist

* 'Suppose it ill paid: the wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desirable.'-'Letter to a Young Gentleman who proposes to embrace the Career of Art' ('Across the Plains,' 1892).

+ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Writing,' 1921.