Explorations 199 1. The Futurist theoretician should be a Professor of Hoffman Romance, and attempt the manufacture of a perfect being. Art merges in Life again everywhere. Leonardo was the first Futurist, and, incidentally, an airman among Quattro Cento angels. His Mona Lisa eloped from the Louvre like any woman. She is back again now, smiling, with complacent reticence, as before her escapade; no one can say when she will be off once more, she possesses so much vitality. Her olive pigment is electric, so much more so than the carnivorous Belgian bumpkins by Rubens in a neighbouring room, who, besides, are so big they could not slip about in the same subtle fashion. Rubens IMITATED Life—borrowed the colour of its crude blood, traced the sprawling and surging of its animal hulks. Leonardo MADE NEW BEINGS, delicate and severe, with as ambitious an intention as any ingenious mediaeval Empiric. He multiplied in himself, too, Life’s possibilities. He was not content to be as an individual Artist alone, any more than he was content with Art. Life won him with gifts and talents. 2. In Northern Europe (Germany, Scandinavia and Russia) for the last half century, the inteltectual world has developed savagely in one direction—that of Life. His war-talk, sententious elevation and much besides, picked up from Strindberg, with his hysterical and puissant autobiographies, life-long tragic coquetry with Magic, extensive probing of female flesh and spirit, is the great Scandinavian figure best representing this tendency. Bergson, the philosopher of Impressionism, stands for this new prescience in France.