Art for us is no longer a means for the evocation of emotion; a magic net cast over all the nude and undesirable body of life. We are too full of lusts for such an art. We are done with “the brooding East”, with the Tagores; with the Ajanta caves; with the dun yellows and faded crimsons of Hindustan. We know ourselves again to be of the European tradition: the tradition of men who think and act. Our art must serve life. Which is to say it must serve our wills and desires. For we desire multitudinous things: loves, travels and insurrections. We have lived too long as mud in the hands of chance and a military system. Every fibre of body and soul is athirst. We desire women, horses and dogs, and wines. We desire adventures that are adventures of the spirit and not solely a hazard of blood and health. We desire a society reshaped and to be concerned in that inflaming and organization of the people that alone can precipitate so vast a change. We are ready to turn again to our old purposes: to that large movement that will control the fate of all existing polities and is called Syndicalism, the new Unionism, Industrial Unionism, Anarchy as latitude or language alters; to our intentions in Ireland, Catalonia, or among the broken nations of the Slavs; to the fantastic keenness of a sculpture and a painting become militant and seeking ever further into the reality of man’s consciousness and semblance. But we return to these enthusiasms disciplined by unaccustomed rigors. We have learned to live directly; to think clearly, to act and have no doubts. Henceforward, for us Art will be a thing of clear outlines, simplicity, and practical purpose. It must administer to our desires. It must be part of our will: that is of our philosophy and lust. It must be evangelist. It must carry a sword in its cloak. We shall have no use for the Imagist telling three lines of the passage of some faint tremor of joy or repugnance. Nor shall we applaud the Vorticist poet jerking in angular words a cinematograph picture across the mind. We want a verse with blood in it. We want verse in a hundred manners—aphrodisiac or insurrectionary, mournful, obscene, or profound. Only we want a verse that is not trivial and is not cold. Similarly we want plays and essays and tales. But we want a drama that is less a drama of discussion than one of action, essays that are shaped to a purpose, stories that show life untruly, venomous, unfair, eloquent tales that inflame, that espouse and condemn. We want an art inspired by a love of action. We want an art that is the evocation of sustained and coherent desire. We want an art astir with the conscious movement of a soul that wills; an art of purposes and lusts. For we have ventured our lives and received them back invigorated by danger: we have learned in hardships the value of desire and through endurance have discovered how contemptible is an art of delicate and unsure pleasures, of dilettantism, of varied, sterile, and mutable emotions.