Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/688

588 il y aura peut-être une métaphysique dada, une psychologie dada, une medicine dada, etc. Dada qui symbolise le dégoût de tout."

If that is really what Dada symbolizes, Dada can be accepted as an êtat d'esprit raisonnable even by the conservatives, even by Dr Robinson of the museum, for if there's anything that's more prevalent than the influenza it's a disgust with everything. All of our business men are disgusted with everything. It's what J. Pierpont Morgan felt returning from the Bankers' Conference in Paris, it's what Henry Ford felt contemplating the coal strike, it's what President Harding felt contemplating the Bonus Bill, and Dr Robinson once publicly confessed that he never could be happy again until life became a little more Greek than it is at present.

M Pierre de Massot is, according to M Francis Picabia, a young man of extraordinary sensitiveness, who but lately came up to Paris from the provinces and immediately came to correct conclusions in regard to Marthe Chenal, les mademoiselles Mistinguett et Spinelly, madame Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan. M de Massot's "book" consists of the minimum of writing and the maximum of pictures and these last look as though a child had cut portions of photographs from the illustrated press and pasted them together into free compositions. They are Dada, but they have a merit not always associated with dadaism and which Dr Robinson ought to appreciate, of being understandable and independent of titles. Any infant, for instance, would recognize madame Bernhardt and her wooden leg—it could be no one else in the universe; and although only a portion of mademoiselle Chenal's bust and one arm has been clipped from the ephemeral newspaper the arrangement conserves perfectly for posterity this lady's peculiar parfum. A slight doubt exists in the case of the interpretation of the Marche Slave by Isadora, which by hasty students might be mistaken for a carelessly made plan for a scarecrow for the bean patch, but even in this, once one has been told it is Isadora one may believe. The calf of one of the legs, for one thing, is unmistakeably hers. It is the legs of his subjects that M de Massot most insists upon and in the cases of Mistinguett and his own wife, he shows nothing else—though in this last instance, if M de Massot be so extraordinarily sensitive as they say he is, I suppose we had better say limbs.