Good art, like everything else good, springs from controversy, _from the assertion of the individual_, from the mighty struggle of every sincere and enthusiastic man to convince the world that _he_ is right and that _his_ works and ways are better than those of all other men. * * * * * That is just what the new men are striving to do now--each is trying to convince the world _he_ is right, that _his_ methods, _his_ departures, _his_ theories are true. The Cubist does not admit much of value in the Futurist, while the latter see nothing at all in Cubism. In short the “isms” are more at war among themselves than with the older schools. Out of the seething conflict of forces good is sure to come; the amount of good depending directly upon the sharpness of the conflict. V WHAT IS CUBISM? What is “Cubism?” One more name added to the long roll of “movements” in art. Within the memory of living men we have had “Classicists,” “Romanticists,” “Idealists,” “Naturalists,” “Realists,” “Pre-Raphaelites,” and many more. Today we have the “Neo-Impressionists,” the “Pointilists,” the “Luminists,” the “Futurists,” the “Orphists,” the “Sensationalists,” the “Compositionalists,” the “Synchronists,” the “Cubists”--tomorrow? New and ever new departures, experiments, achievements. All of which goes to prove that art is living, for the sign of life is flux. * * * * * The other day I saw three well-known American painters standing before a cubist picture laughing; _painters of forty years ago_ would have laughed quite as heartily _at the works of each of the three_. The innovation of today is the conventional of tomorrow. Because the names of Rembrandt and Hals are now household words in art we are quick to assume their pictures were always considered great. Not so. Just now it is a fad of millionaires to own Rembrandts; consequently he is over-appreciated and ridiculously overpriced. * * * * * The bare thought of the scorn that greeted Wagner’s operas, the poems of Browning, and Whitman, sends a cold [Illustration: METZINGER The Taster] [Illustration: LEGER The Chimneys] chill down our backs, makes us pause in our headlong criticism lest we, too, pillory ourselves. Violent judgments are good fun, but they often come back to plague us. Of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” Ruskin said: