In Mr. Nevinson's war pictures there is expressed a modern sense of war
as an abnormal occupation; and this sense shows itself in the very
method of the artist. He was something of a Cubist before the war; but
in these pictures he has found a new reason for being one; for his
cubist method does express, in the most direct way, his sense that in
war man behaves like a machine or part of a machine, that war is a
process in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in a
great instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person and
is lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repetition and sharp
distinction of planes, expresses this sense of mechanical process better
than any other way of representation. Perhaps it came into being to
express the modern sense of process as the ultimate reality of all
things, even of life and growth. This is the age of mechanism; and
machines have affected even our view of the universe; we are overawed by
our own knowledge and inventions. Samuel Butler imagined a future in
which machines would come to life and make us their slaves; but it is
not so much that machines have come to life as that we ourselves have
lost the pride and sweetness of our humanity; not that the machines seem
more and more like us, but that we seem more and more like the machines.
Everywhere we see processes to which we are subject and of which our
humanity is the result, though in the past we have harboured the
delusion that our humanity was in some way independent of processes.
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