tists are not content to have done it once.
They keep on emptying the contents of ragbags and dustbins on to
canvases in the most wearisome way. After a time one can neither laugh
at them nor take them seriously. One can simply repeat the name of
their new review with violent sincerity.

It is not, however, with the Futurists themselves that one's chief
quarrel is. It is with the people who do not support the Futurists,
but will not condemn them for fear of going down to posterity in the
same boat as the people who once ridiculed Wagner and the
Impressionists. This fear of the laughter of posterity is surely the
last sign of decadence. It is the kind of thing that, in the religious
world, would prevent you from criticising the Prophet Dowie or Mrs
Eddy. It would compel you to take all new movements seriously simply
because they were new. It would lead you to suspend your judgment
about the Tango till you were in your grave and your grandchild could
come and whisper posterity's verdict to your tombstone. It is, I
agree, a fine thing to have a hospitable mind for new things--to be
able to greet a Wordsworth or a Manet appreciatively on his first
rising. Artists have the right to demand that their work shall be
judged, not according to whether it fits in with certain old
standards, but by its new power of affecting the emotions and the
imagination. Great artists are continually extending the boundaries of
their art, and there are, in the last resort, no rules to judge art by
except that the artist must by one means or another succeed in
bringing something to life. Boccioni satisfies the test in his
sculpture, and therefore we must praise him, whether we like his
methods or not. The majority of the Futurists, on the other hand,
produce no more effect of life than a diagram in Euclid which has been
crossed and blotted out with inks of various colours.

Even, however, when, as in the case of the sculptures of Boccioni and
the paintings of Severini, we admit that a brilliant imagination is at
work, we are not necessarily committed to belief in the methods
through which that imagination happens to express itself. It is
possible to enjoy Whitman's poetry without believing that he has laid
down the essential lines for the poetry of the future. One may agree
that Boccioni and Severini have justified their methods by results as
far as they themselves are concerned; this does not mean that one
agrees with them when they preach the