camouflage has paralleled in its logic the development of modern art. As one passes the camouflaged steamers in our harbors it is apparent that the particular system of color planes which disguise them would never have been so readily devised if the clue to it had not already existed in cubist and futurist canvases. The atmospheric unity binding figure and landscape in a picture has been transferred to the soldier in the field, and the identity of a freighter becomes as unrecognizable as the features of Mr. X in a portrait by Picasso. We have found that naked weapons are ineffective, and called on the artist to decorate them. Every belligerent in turn has experienced the necessity of illuminating the naked. word, and relied on its designer of advertisements to illustrate the text

of each crisis, eloquently enough to arouse a nation to lend its savings or change its diet. But the mere fact that the artist may also help to win the war in unexpected fashion does not satisfy us. We demand a profounder interpretation of war than he can give by advertising it, piecemeal, to the man in the street. We crave any purgation he can find for our pity and terror before the amazing proportions of modern carnage. We appeal to him to resume his historic rôle as the interpreter of human events in recording the permanent significance of our memories, in dignifying our common experience.

Our impatience expresses itself in an insatiable appetite for pictures. We want pictures, pictures of every ruined church, every trench in winter,

in the mud of spring, bombardments, aeroplanes, Hill 203, Hill 304, field hospitals, base hospitals, ships at sea, every process of building them. The innumerable photographs on newspapers and magazines do not satiate us. We need the artist to dramatize the significance of every moment typical of the career of a soldier, a ship, or a cannon. Nothing must escape us. And the necessity of satisfying this craving has in turn become part of the conduct of war. Each French army has its official painter, and there are others incessantly touring every front. American painters have been attached to our expeditionary forces. The British government commissions a series of thirty-six lithographs. This is perhaps the first war in which the artist

is a necessary adjunct to the general staff and has a combatant's standing.

Possibly because we recognize the supreme importance of this war, as contrasted with all other wars, and its significance in the destiny of mankind such as no other war has had or may ever have again, the features of every hill and every trench, as well as the features of every general and the type of every soldier, seem eternally memorable. But we are like a lover who feels that the scene of his tryst is a shrine, and carves initials on trees, with the sense of turning them into monuments. We are like the mourner who exaggerates the importance of a tomb in perpetuating the memory of a hero. A few hills and valleys of this war will become per

In

manent memories. But we shall feel no particular need of visualizing them slashed with trenches and pitted with shell holes in order to intensify our realization of their importance. most of our furious picturing of this war we have done nothing more than encourage reporting on an elaborate scale, and we are certain to report most eagerly the very facts which will not vitally interest us five years after the conclusion of peace. We are editing a history of the war more fully illustrated than the history of any other war, a fact chiefly of interest to future historians. Our official documents will be more vivid than others have been, and perhaps a more precious source of material for the novelist. And the fact that we dispatch our most distinguished etchers, litho

graphers and draughtsmen to the front cannot alter the futility of our enterprise. Constable might have been sent to sketch the sunken road at Waterloo, or Inness commissioned to paint the stone wall at Gettysburg. What significance would they have for us now, as distinct from any road in Kent or any other stone wall in Vermont?

For the problem of illustrating the war is simply the problem that confronts any artist in recording any object: he must find some way of depicting it which can permanently revive our sense of its original significance. Because we conceive this war as a struggle of spiritual forces, we conceive every ship, every forge, and every garden-plot as their protagonist, as well as every soldier. And by constant process of transference of emo

tional values every object has become surcharged with an emotional significance which may never again be plausible. But for any painter to succeed in conveying even their vicarious significance, two talents are essential: imagination enough to seize what aspect it is which makes any scene, any figure, inherently memorable; and intensity of conviction powerful enough to find a pictorial method of expressing it. For it is only the intensity of an artist's conviction which compels us to remain interested in whatever he depicts-whether it be a war, a beggar, or a ballet-dancer.

II

Of the Englishmen who have attempted to portray the war, C. R. W. Nevinson alone seems to possess this necessary quality of imagination, which becomes apparent if one compares his work with that of the other

English lithographers. Compare Nevinson's "Patrols" with Pears's study of a freighter loading at night, and sententiously entitled "Maintaining Overseas Forces". Whatever meaning this latter lithograph may have is given to it because, I am informed, this is a ship supplying an army. What the picture illustrates is the trick, known to any draughtsman, that by standing near the water-line and gazing at the bow, any tramp steamer of 3000 tons can be made to have the bulk of a Leviathan. Mr. Pears, to get his momentary climax and achieve his immediate effect, has made the ship seem big, a powerful thing, protected by its searchlights as by an arch of swords. Now, this notion of a steamer may be pictorially effective, but it is merely part of our arrogant confidence in the bulk of a merchant marine which the submarine destroyed forever, by proving the larg

est ship an extremely vulnerable shell. Maintaining an army overseas, if it means anything, means an almost defenseless journey over a waste of menacing waters. Note how unerringly Mr. Nevinson has made his ship seem small, how in its relation to the mountainous swell of black waves it is almost obliterated, a fragile thing before the eternal menace of the sea, whether it be submarines or reefs or floating mines. "Patrols" might even more fittingly be entitled "Maintaining Overseas Forces", for in the relation of its forms, the lines of its movement,

the suggestion of menace and danger in the blacks and grays, it expresses precisely what we have felt time and again: that the safety of the largest armies in the world hung by a single thread-a thread of little black ships threading their way over black waters. What Mr. Nevinson has expressed is our vision of ships in this war, of the eternal rôle of ships asserting their precarious mastery of the sea. Mr. Pears, however cleverly, has achieved nothing more than the portrait of any steamer.

Or again, compare Nevinson's "La