made mobs fashionable and the word en-masse English, did not to any appreciable extent dally with his fellow writers.
The only gesture of a contrary sort that I have heard of is Rockwell Kent's and it is quite a sweeping one. He has sailed away, before the mast like R. H. Dana, to Tierra del Fuego and will write and draw a book of his experiences there. Mr Kent loves adventure and is after it, but it is also clear that the getting away from what he is getting away from counted for fifty per cent in starting him. Mr Kent is not a Blake who could be isolated in London and knows, for he has been told it, of the danger that lies in "influences," particularly to the susceptible Americans of this era. He has been lauded for being Blake-like and Hogarthian, though not by the discreet, but in his inmost heart doubtless he hopes to cast Blake and Hogarth overboard into the Magellan Straits and forget them. May he do so, if only for the sakes of his youthful followers who may be induced to chuck over their own great ghosts of the past. As for Kent, himself, he not only has Blake and Hogarth to do away with, but also the great R. H. Dana, Jr. It is too bad he handicaps himself at the start of such a laudable enterprise by putting up such a masterpiece as Two Years Before the Mast to hurdle over. The world, in fact, is too small for Mr Kent and for most Americans. No matter where one goes someone seems to have been there. "On n'est jamais le premier," as the ribald song has it. But some day he and the most perspicacious of his group will discover that originality is not a thing that may be snatched from a bush. It comes paradoxically enough oftener to those who are indifferent to it and almost never to those who deliberately seek it.
It was impatience at the cussed wilfulness of the gods who distributed this gift that produced the movement Dada. Now that the movement has almost quit moving, so much may be admitted and M Pierre de Massot, in his recent Essai de Critique Théâtrale, openly says:
"Hélas, les efforts nouveaux aboutissent a des resultats decevants et l'ennui qui naît de l'uniformité ou de l'habitude est toujours de plus en plus fort. De cet ennui est né Dada, le seul état d'esprit raisonnable, Dada qui n'est pas mort et ne mourra jamais. Je crois au contraire à l'importance de plus en plus considérable de Dada; il existe une musique dada, une peinture dada, une literature dada;
