In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

(_An Exchange with Malcolm Cowley_) a. It is possible in small space to touch but briefly, and upon one of its phases, the complex and defunct Dada movement. Its immediate progenitors were the Italian heirs of Athens and of Rome-they called themselves futurists: a restless Jew whose ancestors had settled in Rumania brought it to Paris. It had behind it, therefore, the ripe Mediterranean littorals and the full growth of Europe. It was a salutary burst of laughter in a world that felt itself too old. Europe was crystallized and desired a solvent. It creaked in stratified forms and laws and notions, and it yearned to explode.

The War was a violent but unsatisfactory excursion of a similar sort. The ponderous machinations of diplomacy had prepared this laughter of young millions rushing to a bright shambles from the straitened gloom of ordered cities and inherited farms. But the war was too superficial. Jaded Europe learned the inconsequent effect of such inebriety as death and murder. The deep spirit of the land was unmoved by columns of men miles long and by guns that raked cities. It was the esthetes of France-the solemn romanticists, the shrill Parnassians, the symbolists, the votaries of Bergson, it was the pragmatists of Germany and the rhetoricians of Italy, who invited the release of Dada by their formulations, hedgings-in and dogmas. There is no doubt that the face of Europe yearned for the smashing of a few cathedrals. But also the heart of Europe hungered after the battering of a few spiritual laws.