"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 own dull eye, but Man as he is to the inner retina of the universe. Man, the simple triangle on two stilts, the creature on one plane and of one dimension, an outline without entity, a nothingness staring, faceless, at the nothingness which baffles his soul. Emotion, idealism, beauty--these have been always the evil spirits that have fettered art. The new art has so exorcised them that they have fled from it with demoniac cries. Pulziacco's splendid rhomboid, "Cleopatra"; Weber-Damm's tender parallelograms, "The Daughters of James Bowles, Esq., J.P"; Todwarden Jones's rectilineal wizardry, "A Basket of Oranges"; and Arabella Machicu's triumph of astigmatism, "The Revolving Bookcase," are examples of this conquest of the inner retina over the brutal insistences of form and matter.