eze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing of the
sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are
supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because
arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of
arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing.

"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact body
which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in
movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and
in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I
wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by an absolute symmetry."

"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're out
against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw
a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and
nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of
Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality
what is only an appearance. The better the likeness the bigger the lie.
But movement and rhythm are realities, not appearances. When I present
rhythm and movement I've done something. I've made reality appear."

He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the exhausted
language by destroying its articulations. These he declared to be purely
arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development of a spontaneous and
individual style. By breaking up the rigid ties of syntax, you do more
than create new forms of prose moving in perfect freedom, you deliver
the creative spirit itself from the abominable contact with dead ideas.
Association, fixed and eternalized by the structure of the language, is
the tyranny that keeps down the live idea.

"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin restored the
innocence of the eye."

* * * * *

Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this
constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it dropped and
broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a frenzied assault on
the Old Masters, a storming of immortal strongholds, a tearing and
scattering of the wing feathers of archangels; then, from this high
adventure it sank to a perfunctory skirmishing among living eminences
over forty, judged, by reason of their age, to be too contemptible for
an attack in force. It rallied again to a bombing and blasting