The second school was aptly named the auto-symbolists. In this school Nietzschean individualism attains its sublime extreme. The artist, instead of expressing his spirit in the vulgar symbols understood by everybody, arbitrarily chooses a symbol known only to himself. If he wishes to depict a determined man going up a mountain on a mule's back he may paint a mouse-trap. To him the mouse-trap perfectly expresses the particular feeling he has when viewing his own mental image of the picture he has decided to paint. What matter about anybody else? If you ask him _cui bono_?--he will reply: why any _bono_ at all? And, of course, he is perfectly logical. And the satisfying aristocratic aloofness of his position! If people--as they surely will--study his mouse-trap and discuss in vain what it portends, if they pay vast sums for his pictures and start a literature of criticisms to guess his unguessable riddles, so much the better. He can laugh at them with diabolical glee. Everybody is a fool but himself, and he can go on creating in the seventh circle of his own soul undisturbed by the barnyard cackle of the world. Has the cubist literature of Gertrude Stein awakened echoes in Chicago? I have read it without understanding before this. But one night my host--a great, strong, humorous, intelligent hulk of a man, himself a scoffer at cubism--read part of her essay on Matisse so that it was almost intelligible. His inflection and punctuation did it. Her chief characteristics seem to be an aversion to personal pronouns and a strict adherence to simple declarative statements, untroubled by subordinate clauses or phrases of any kind. Her thought, therefore, resolves itself awkwardly in a four-square way. The multiplicity of her planes becomes confusing after a page, but each plane stands alone. Thus--(I quote inaccurately)--"Some ones knew this one to be expressing something being struggling. Some ones knew this one not to be expressing something being struggling. This one expressed something being struggling. This one did not express something being struggling." Which, of course, is the cubist way of saying that "Some thought he was trying to express struggle in an object, others thought the contrary. As a matter of fact, he sometimes did express struggle; sometimes he did not." But it seems her early work is now getting too obvious, so she is in the throes of a later phase. In her "Portrait of Miss Dodge" she has eliminated verbs and sentence structure entirely, flinging a succession of image-nouns at the reader. One can surely not accuse her of "prettiness."