* * * * * It is not a matter of attempting to make universal the shibboleths of some coterie or school, or of carrying some technical "stunt" through the country as though it were a fiery cross. We do not propose to maintain (to give concrete examples) that literature _should_ be didactic or that it _should_ be a-moral. We are not interested in urging that the couplet is exhausted, that the sonnet should be revived, that plays should have four or three acts, that rhyme is essential or that it is outworn, that lines should or should not be of regular lengths. We are tied to no system of harmony; we have no dogmas as to the dominance of representation in painting; we would make no hard-and-fast rule about the desirability of drawing a vertical wall as sloping at 45 degrees or of painting a man's face magenta and sage-green. As convenient descriptions we do not object (save sometimes on grounds of euphony) to the terms Futurist, Vorticist, Expressionist, post-Impressionist, Cubist, Unanimist, Imagist: but we suspect them as banners and battle-cries, for where they are used as such it is probable that fundamentals are being forgotten. Our aim will be, as critics, to state and to reiterate what are the motives, and what must be the dominant elements, of all good art, whatever the medium and whatever the idiosyncrasies of the artist, even if he find it convenient to draw on papier-mâché with a red-hot poker, and even if his natural genius impels him to write in lines of one syllable. The profoundest truths about art, whether literary or pictorial, are crystallised in maxims which may have been more often reiterated than understood, but which have undeniably been so often repeated that people now find them tiresome. Of such are "fundamental brainwork," "emotion recollected in tranquillity," "the rhythmical creation of beauty," and "the eye on the object." Each of these embodies truths, and there is indisputable truth also in the statements that a poet should have an ear and that a painter should paint what he sees. These things are platitudes; but a thing does not cease to be true merely because it is trite, and it is disastrous to throw over the obvious merely because it was obvious to one's grandfather. Yet men--and even women--do such things. We have had in the last few years art, so called, which sprang from every sort of impulse but the right one, and was governed by every sort of conceptions but the right ones. We have had "styles" which were mere protests and revulsions against other styles; "styles" which were no more than flamboyant attempts at advertisement akin to the shifting lights of the electric night signs; authors who have forgotten their true selves in the desperate search for remarkable selves; artists who have refused to keep their eyes upon the object because it has been seen before; musicians who have made, for novelty's sake, noises, and painters who have made, for