FROM "FANTASIO," COMIC PAPER OF PARIS. THE ASS BORONALI: PAINTING A "MASTERPIECE.

This farcical protest against the insanities of modernistic art, was actually made on the hill of Montmartre of Paris. Notice the artist inspiring Boronali to paint his "great" work, by offering him sugar.

CHAPTER XVII

THE GOSPEL OF UGLINESS

BY "MEPHISTOPHELES "

Appeared in the March, 1917, issue of "The Art World"

THE readers of THE ART WORLD may ask why I have chosen this channel of communication to the public instead of one of the publications devoted to my propaganda of degen

erate art.

You probably know that I am an aristocrat. Formerly I moved in the highest circles and was entitled to a seat at the council of the Gods. As the result of a misunderstanding I was eliminated from the council. Owing to former associations I prefer good society, not always attainable among my propagandists. In fact I must confess to a certain measure of loathing for the unclean instruments I have heretofore employed.

Confiding in you, I will say that in this talk on art I am telling you the truth-impossible as it may seem! I can tell the truth when it suits my purpose. Of course I am known as the greatest liar in the universe, having been named "Father of Lies." Consequently, when I wish to impress the people in a way opposite the truth, I tell them the truth.

Many years ago there lived and sang in German a troubadour named Goethe. That was before Germany became obsessed with science. There were poets and musicians who sang of Loreleis and Rhine maidens and of a hero called Siegfried. This troubadour became interested in one of my adventures and wove it into a song quite as notable in some ways as Homer's story of Ulysses. This adventure was my journey with Faust. As the story runs, one eventful evening

I appeared to Faust as a travelling scholar. He asked that I explain myself. I answered thus:

I am the spirit that denies

And justly so: for all things from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed.

'Twere better, then, were naught created.
Thus, all which you as Sin have rated—
Destruction-aught with Evil blent-
That is my proper element.

This is my creed and expresses in a concrete form my philosophy.

In my negation of the material world and my aversion to beauty and my worship of ugliness I move within a closed circle to a point of contact with Buddha and St. Francis. Note also that my chant expresses a sinister pessimism, which is one of my chief characteristics. Indeed, it were better that the human brood were never created than to be forever building card-houses to be knocked down, as they are doing now in Europe. However, as it is not possible to extinguish the race, I will aim to destroy the one thing that more than all else makes life attractive and worth living on this planet. I will negate beauty and establish the gospel of ugliness.

As the supreme exponent of negation I can only exist through opposition to the divine order of truth and beauty. Therefore I will exercise all my powers to disturb the cosmic harmony. In past time my efforts to involve the world in total discord have failed, but at present, for the first time in history, I have almost arrived at a complete realization of my cherished ideals in the destruction of life and art-the world-wide negation of beauty and consequent worship of ugliness.

I am minded to transport myself to a peak in the Alps, and, viewing therefrom the slaughter and ruin of the nations, congratulate myself with a fiendish chuckle on my triumph over the three grand obsessions of the human race: religion, philosophy and science. In fact never before have I felt so powerful and so encouraged to press on to the attainment of absolute negation. I no longer masquerade as scholar, professor or priest, but stride over the world as Utilitaria, smiting the fair land of Europe with war and famine, and America

with greed and Stygian ugliness. Thus, denying the cosmic trend toward beauty, I advance toward the ideal ugliness.

You mortals are on the wrong track; in the past you have looked for salvation to transcendentalism and philosophy, and now science. All three have failed you. But there is a certain cult which you have never fairly tried, at least not in modern times-the Cult of Beauty.

Being a generous devil and feeling measurably sure of success, I will amuse myself by telling you the secret of this cult, knowing perfectly well that you will not believe a word that I say. What I refer to is: the ideal of beauty which is the basic volition of your Cosmos or God.

Every object of material growth in the universe is perfect and beautiful in its varying scale of development-unless mutilated or disorganized by some one of the powers I employ to negate the divine order. The most elementary forms of life, dragged up from the bottom of the sea, are quickened through the Cosmic Volition toward beauty into balanced masses and rhythmic lines, and this volition continues in its ceaseless quest for beauty throughout the entire scale of creation upward to man.

This cosmic urge toward the ideal beauty is the voice of your God, uttering itself through matter in a definite trend or stream of tendency. And this is the one trend or stream of tendency throughout the kingdom of nature that you can prove to exist by actual demonstration-without any resort whatsoever to religion, philosophy or science. Such a demonstration forms also an impregnable standard of beauty. For all normal products of the creative mind are based upon the laws of proportion, rhythm and equilibrium, rising in their quality of beauty in the ratio that they involve these fundamental laws.

Also this cult of the ideal beauty would furnish you with a workable definition of Morals, which you do not possess at the present time. That which makes for a realization of this ideal is moral, whatever presents an obstacle to its attainment is immoral.

Whenever I employ the agencies of negation, such as disease or violence, to disturb the normal development of nature, its character is at once changed to abnormal. The

balanced masses become unbalanced, their proportion and rhythm at once become disorganized. Instead of beauty and harmony there is discord and ugliness.

You may ask why this element of negation is always present. I will tell you. It means conflict, without which the universe would sink into the stagnation of monotony which is death. Life means perpetual conflict with death. Whenever one of my agencies of negation disturbs the normal creative volition, whether in a human being or in a painting, it means death. My mission is to create disorder, and as Ruskin truly says: "Death is the consummation of disorder.”

As the supreme Spirit of Negation, I am at perpetual war with the creative cosmos. I win victories, but do not win the

war.

The pestilent Greeks, with their ideal of beauty, have given me more trouble than all other races of mankind. Their ideal will not down. Roman brutality and materialism were to some extent leavened by this ideal and it almost triumphed; but my importation of Oriental luxury and vice, together with the stagnation induced by ill-used wealth, paralyzed the Greek cult in Rome and destroyed it.

The breaking up of the Roman Empire completed what I thought to be a permanent success for my programme, but I discerned signs of a revival of the Greek cult which might have developed into an organized power to build a new civilization on the ruins of Rome.

Fortunately this menace to my plans was averted by the world becoming obsessed by progressive transcendentalismwith its consciousness of guilt. This consciousness of guilt, in the transcendental ascetic, is born of a belief that his spirit is imprisoned in the flesh-first physically and further mentallyby everything that makes the material world attractive. Therefore his first duty is to resist and deny the natural world. Buddha taught his disciples "that all beings were entangled in a web of passions; tossed upon the raging billows of a sea of everrenewing existences; whirling in a vortex of endless miseries; tormented incessantly by the stings of concupiscence; sunk in a dark abyss of ignorance; the wretched victims of an illusory, unsubstantial and unreal world."

And he further says "that sentient existence is attached