McKenna ... "_Nose-bagtime._"
By-electionscope.

* * * * *

THE RETROGRADE.

"He wanted to see the town grow larger and the dates grow less."

_Birmingham Daily Post_.

"Come where the dates grow smaller!"

* * * * *

A KEY TO CUBISM.

The chief exponent of "the new geometric art" explains the whole
movement in the following passage, as reproduced in _The Observer_:--

"Primitive space has entered into us, as it were.... Against
that space within us, as against the space that appalled the
savage from without, we erect always more hard and logical
images.... All brute material, animate and inanimate, of earth,
becomes an organism to confront the soul. Formerly the soul as a
simple figure, like a ballet, faced the environing vagueness.

"Appearance then, at present, becomes a dyke around the invision
from within. And, as a consequence even of this, the appearance,
as it is seen in art to-day, tends to be more removed from
everyday objective reality than at any former period of art. A
new religion is being built up, girder by girder, around the
vague spirit. _Space_, the physical space of savage shyness, _is
now on our side_."

The comment of the writer in _The Observer_ runs thus: "This, at any
rate, is the language of people who know what they are about."

_Mr. Punch_, being a little fearful lest the average reader of the above
passage may not share this knowledge of "what they are about," ventures
to add his own views on Cubism, confident that even those who disagree
will applaud his clarity.

From RAPHAEL until PCESZY TURGIDOFF (the brilliant young Slav whose
canvas has recently been acquired by the Royal Geological Museum) all
true artists have striven to adumbrate the eternal conflict between the
morbid pathology of Realism and the poignant simplicity of Nihilism. In
other and shorter words, chaos must ever be on the side of the angels.
But, until the advent of the new Truth, the whole mission of art had
trickled into a very delta of arid sentiment. The critic could walk all
the galleries of Europe and find nothing to lighten his melancholy until
he entered one of those caverns of earliest man and stood in ecstatic
reverence before the incomparable masterpieces wherein the first of the
Futurists created (with perfect parsimony of a sharpened flint) Man, not
as he is to his o