"Repose-toi!... Repose-toi!... il n'est doux que dormir!..."
"Non, la vie est à brûler comme un falot de paille,
Il faut l'ingurgiter d'une lampe hardie,
Tels ces jongleurs de foire qui vont mangeant du feu
D'un coup de langue, escamotant la Mort dans l'estomac."
The above quotation from M. Marinetti's poem, _Le Démon de la Vitesse_,
is well adapted to give some idea of the feverish but sustained energy
of those pictures whose recent exhibition in the Sackville Gallery so
successfully scandalised not only the _doyens_ of the Royal Academy but
even the official champions of all that is new and progressive in our
modern English art. But for a correct appreciation even of the Futurist
pictures themselves, it is essential to realise that, so far from
being the mere isolated extravagances and _tours de force_ of a new
technique, they constitute an integral part of a living scheme, which
with all its lavish use of the most ostentatious hyperbolism, has yet
claims to be seriously considered as a substantial movement, artistic,
literary, economic, sociological, and above all human.
Let us then make some scrutiny of this "Rising City" of Futurism, as
it rears with such vehement exaltation from out the trampled debris
of a superseded and dishonoured past. For this purpose, having first
examined those conditions of contemporary Italy which more immediately
provoked this "Red Rebellion," we shall proceed to some analysis of
the general character of the movement and of the aggressive and
sensational works of M. Marinetti himself, the audacious Mercury of
this new message.
The direct cause of the Futurist movement is to be found in the fact
that that modern current of electric energy, which has been galvanising
the states of Northern and Central Europe to a more and more strenuous
and a more and more complicated activity has, so far as Italy is
concerned, not succeeded in flowing further south than Milan. In this
connection it is not without its significance that, while Milan is
indubitably the vital and commercial capital of the peninsula, the
official capital should be merely Rome, aureoled with its hybrid halo
of majesty and malaria, the centre of the tourist, the archæologist,
and the Papacy, that august shadow of a once living empire.
Even, moreover, the great heroes of the _Risorgimento Italiano_,
the euphonious title by which Italians designate the unification of
their country, suffered from an undue obsession with the democratic
ideals of a mediæval past. Dissipating their energy in rushing reams
of republican rhetoric or the purple pomp of patriotic platitudes,
they remained sublimely oblivious to the crying economic needs of
a country which, with all its natural richness and all its natural
genius, still, so far as general material and intellectual progress
is concerned, lags no inconsiderable distance behind the increasingly
quick march of the European civilisation. Nor did matters improve
when the régime of the naïf idealists was succeeded by that of the
opportunist bureaucracy which has since governed Italy. A vast portion
of the country still remains unforested, uncultivated, unirrigated,
and above all uneducated. The taint of malaria still infects wide
tracts of land, which with proper treatment might have been profitably
developed by those masses of sturdy labourers who have emigrated to
America with an almost Irish eagerness. Indeed with all respect to
M. Marinetti, who has himself fought in the Tripolitan trenches, the
Italo-Turkish war was occasioned (if we can rely on one of the most
brilliant and responsible of the Parisian reviews) not so much by a
_bonâ fide_ desire to find a place in the sun for the not yet surplus
population of a not yet fully developed country, as by an indisputably
authentic ambition to find a lucrative outlet for the money of the
clique of clerical capitalists who control the Bank of Rome. So far,
however, as no inconsiderable portion of Italy itself is concerned,
we are confronted with a country of museums, ruins, and ciceroni
which, exploiting the _Fremdenindustrie_ after the manner of some
more perverse and inexcusable Switzerland, prostitutes with venal
ostentation the faded beauties of its undoubtedly glorious past to the
complete ruin of its only potentially splendid present.
A certain pseudo-Nietzscheanism has no doubt been introduced into Italy
beneath the auspices of D'Annunzio. Yet, with all his fanfaronnade of
tense and exuberant virility, the atmosphere of D'Annunzio is, speaking
broadly, moistly rank and exotically enervating. With the possible
exception of his latest novel, his heroes are languidly feverish
dilettantes whose lives are principally devoted to the literary and
æsthetic cultivation of all the neurotic luxuriance of their own erotic
morbidities. This brings us to the important sociological fact of that
rigid obsession with sex, as the one paramount emotional, artistic,
and vital value which, sapping the manhood not only of Italy but also
indeed of France, tends to corrupt the whole social, political, and
economic life of the two nations.
It is this exaggerated preoccupation with the sexual aspect of life
which has produced, by way of a vehement but deliberate _riposte_, the
important Futurist maxim, "Méprisez la femme." With an enthusiasm in
fact almost worthy of our own Young Men's Christian Association, these
comparative Hippolyti of a young mother-country, only recently wedded
in the bonds of political union, flaunt themselves as the unscrupulous
iconoclasts of such firmly established national ideals as "the glorious
conception of Don Juan and the grotesque conception of the cocu."
Thus the Futurists would banish the nude from painting and adultery
from the novel, so that they may be able to substitute the sublime
male fury of creation of artistic and scientific masterpieces for all
the sterile embraces of hedonistic eroticism, and, like some gallant
band of twentieth-century Hercules, cleanse the Augean stables of the
Latin civilisation of its vast surplus of malignant mud vomited forth
by that stewing and pestiferous swamp of sex. As an antidote to that
virulent plague of luxurious and diseased sexuality, which it is their
self-imposed mission to eradicate, they pen the drastic prescription
of "patriotism and war, the only hygiene of the world." So hot indeed
is the ardour of these militant apostles of a new Latin civilisation,
that they once incurred the displeasure of established authority by
insisting on a war with Austria with such a maxim of vehemence that
an Austrian journal actually demanded the intervention of the Italian
Government.
And whether this policy indicates the mere tetanic spasms of a
delirious Chauvinism, or the lucid vision of an inspired if heretical
diplomacy, it is certainly symptomatic of a tense, combative, and
drastic energy which is, in the deepest sense of the word, essentially
Nietzschean. In this connection the attitude of the Futurists towards
Nietzsche is instructive. They have read his books, thrilled to his
magic, and yet they repudiate him. For they cavil, and not altogether
unreasonably, at the bigoted and hidebound dualism of Nietzsche's
political philosophy, and his obstinate and obsolete division of the
political world into the divine spirit of a few strong geniuses and the
brute matter of a weak and numerous proletariate.
Yet, taking the matter in its broad lines, M. Marinetti's programme
for "the indefinite physiological and intellectual progress of man"
expresses admirably the whole theory of the Nietzschean Superman.
Nietzschean also are such phrases as, "the type inhuman, mechanical,
cruel, omniscient and combative," or "the multiplied man who mingles
with iron, nourishes himself on electricity, and only appreciates the
delight of the danger and of the heroism of every single day." The
real distinction lies in the fact that the Futurist Superman is more
practical, more concrete, more up-to-date, and, above all, infinitely
less dreamy than his elder and more pedantic brother.
And in spite of M. Marinetti's analysis of Nietzscheanism as nothing
but the artificial resurrection of a dead and past antiquity, the two
ideals are harmonious in their denunciation of the facile and automatic
reverence for "the good old days," and their savage exhortation to
"sweep away the grey cinders of the Past with the incandescent lava of
the Future."
This announcement of a virile desire to improve and improve and
improve, not only on the past but also on the present, constitutes
the principal mark in the Futurist platform. Hence the leaders of
the movement have coined the two words _passéisme_, the object of
their onslaught, and _Futurism_, the watch-word of their faith. And
truculently pushing their theories to the extreme limit of extravagant
logic, M. Marinetti and his brothers in arms exhorted the assembled
Venetians, in the 200,000 multicoloured manifestos which on a certain
memorable day they flung down into the Piazza San Marco, "to cure
and cicatrize this rotting town, magnificent wound of the Past, and
to hasten to fill its small fœtid canals with the ruins of its
tumbling, leprous palaces." But the remedy is constructive as well as
destructive.
"Burn the gondolas, those swings for fools, and erect up to the sky
the rigid geometry of large metallic bridges and factories with waving
hair of smoke; abolish everywhere the languishing curve of the old
architecture."
We see at once how, in this more than Wellsian enthusiasm for all the
romantic possibilities of a scientific civilisation, they declare
the most sanguinary war _à l'outrance_ with that Ruskinian and
Pre-Raphaelite sentimentalism which, sublimely burying its mediæval
head in the immemorial sands of a crumbling past, is somewhat
ill-adapted to confront the onrushing simoon of an increasingly
definite and formidable future. And with the deliberate object of
emphasizing his point with the maximum of provocative aggressiveness,
the Futurist will fling at his enemies the insolent paradox that a
motor-car in motion has a higher æsthetic value than the Victory of
Samothrace, or announce with theatrical solemnity that the pain of
a man is just about as interesting in their eyes as the pain of an
electric lamp, suffering in convulsive spasms and crying out with the
most agonising effects of colour.
Yet if we strip this new "beauty of mechanism" and "æsthetic of speed"
of its loud garb of ostentatious extravagance, the intrinsic theories
themselves strike us as neither monstrous nor unreasonable. For if
we may presume to put our own unauthorised gloss on M. Marinetti's
vividly illuminated manuscript, what the Futurist really wishes is to
break down the conventional divorce that is so often thought to exist
between ideal Art and actual Life, so as to bring the two elements
into the most drastic and immediate contact. Art, in fact, should not
be an escape _from_ but an exaltation _of_ the red impetus of life.
Art's function is not merely to titillate the dispassionate æsthetic
feeling of the dilettante or connoisseur, but to thrill with a keen
vital emotion the actual experiencer of life. Form is not an end in
itself, its sole function is to extract the whole emotional quality
of its content. And when confronted with the problem of what content
is best fitted to be the proper subject of artistic representation,
your Futurist would promptly retort that, inasmuch as the tumultuous
twentieth-century emotions of "steel, pride, fever, and speed" are
those to which the twentieth-century civilisation will naturally
vibrate with the most authentic sympathy, those emotions and those
alone are the proper subject-matter for twentieth-century art.
Having thus obtained some rough idea of the broad lines of the new
Futurism, let us proceed to examine its manifestation in the spheres
of painting and literature. So far as their painting is concerned, the
primary principle of the Futurists is their subordination of intrinsic
æsthetic form to emotional content. This principle, though carried to a
pitch far transcending anything which had ever been previously essayed,
is by no means without its exemplifications, in the history both of
past and contemporary art. Even indeed in the eighteenth century Blake
had transferred on to the painted canvas his highly abstract ideas of
esoteric mysticism. The content of the pictures of Blake is of course
diametrically opposed to the content of the Futurists, yet an authentic
analogy lies in the fact that a content at all should have been
specifically painted. With a similar qualification we can remember with
advantage how Rossetti and Burne-Jones, as indisputably modern in the
fact that they had the courage to paint a content at all, as they were
indisputably reactionary in the actual content which they felt inspired
to portray, gave pictorial representation to the Pre-Raphaelite
nostalgia for a præ-mediæval past. More analogous are the canvases of
Franz von Stuck, the Munich Secessionist, who also sets out to paint
ideas and to give æsthetic form to psychological contents. Thus his
_Krieg_, with its grimly triumphant rider, steadfastly pursuing the
goal of an ideal, future over the wallowing corpses of a transcended
present, expresses perfectly in the sphere of paint the whole spirit of
the Nietzschean Superman.
Even better examples of the growing predominance of the content in the
sphere of art are to be found in Rodin, who moulds even in immobile
statuary something of the tumultuous sweep of the present age, or in
Max Klinger the creator in concrete form of the most abstract and
impalpable ideas.
So also modern music, as represented at any rate by the tense
restlessness of Richard Strauss with all his fine shades of crouching
fear and exultant cruelty, or the mystical sensuousness of Debussy,
ceases to be a mere meaningless euphony of pleasing melody, devoid of
any vital significance except its own æsthetic beauty, sets itself more
and more to travel, in the sphere of sound, over the whole vibrant
gamut of the human emotions.
To achieve the presentation of a content with the maximum of drastic
effect, the Futurists have invented a new technique. Without embarking
oh any elaborate technical discussion, we would say that their chief
principle in the painting of apparently even the most objective
phenomena is that it should be the aim of the artist to reproduce no
mere picturesque copy of some stationary pose, but that whole sensorial
or emotional quality inherent in all dynamic life which radiates to
the mind of the spectator, or which again may be simply flashed into
dynamic life by the mind of the spectator himself.
And as, according to our latest and most fashionable metaphysical
authority, the ego, whether of a man, an insect, or a cosmos, is merely
a movement, it should not strike us as altogether unreasonable if
the dynamic idea of movement should enter very prominently into the
Futurist paintings. For, realising fully that consciousness is a stream
and not a pond, and that both cerebral memories and visual impressions
are but, as it were, the flying nets hastily created and re-created
to catch a world that is perpetually on the run, the Futurists make
boldly ingenious efforts to capture the jumping chameleon of truth, by
portraying not one but several phases of the unending series of the
human cinematograph.
Thus in Severini's picture of the "Pan-Pan dance at the Monico," the
artist sets himself to paint the whole moving, multicoloured soul of
this by no means spiritual Montmartre tavern, with all its various
subdivisions of male and female customers engaged in their mutual
revels and their mutual dances, the deviltry of its _rigolo_ music, and
all the hustling clash and clatter of its insolent carouse.--
It is also significant of their general _Weltanschauung_ that the
Futurists should frequently find their inspiration in the speed,
stress, and creativity of a glorious modernity. Thus Russolo's
"Rebellion," angular, aggressive, rampant, reproduces the whole red
energy of an insurgent proletariate, while the same painter's "Train"
essays, and not unsuccessfully, to paint the very lights and ridges of
velocity itself.
The feats of the new culture in the realm of literature are quite as
impressive and as sensational as in that of painting. This brings us
to some consideration of M. Marinetti himself, both the real and the
official, chief of the new movement.
To comprehend the true essence of this man, who certainly constitutes
a European portent which, whether hated or loved, can scarcely be
ignored, it is necessary to realise that while a poet he is above all a
man of the world and of action. While, also, as would appear from his
visit to the _Morning Post_ correspondent in Tripoli, he is a gentleman
inflamed by a genuine if no doubt slightly truculent patriotism, he
has all the advantages of being an almost perfect cosmopolitan. Born
in Egypt of Italian parents, educated in France, and now directing the
Futurist movement from Milan, M. Marinetti combines all the heat of an
African temperament with all the mercurial dash and aggressiveness of
the modern Latin civilisation. At present only in the early thirties,
M. Marinetti founded in the years 1904--1905 his international review
_Poesia_. To this journal he endeavoured to attract all that was
strenuous, aspiring, and daring in the artistic youth of the Latin
civilisation. Eventually the various tentative ideals and ideas which
he and his colleagues entertained became crystallised in the word
_Futurism_, which grew more and more a definite creed with a more and
more definite catechism of literature, music, painting, politics, and
life. Since the publication of the first Futurist manifesto in the
_Figaro_ in 1909, M. Marinetti has devoted himself to waging with
all his militant energy of tongue, sword, and pen the campaign of
Futurism. Meeting after meeting, demonstration after demonstration has
he addressed in Italy, and, carrying the war into the enemy's country,
he has even had the audacity to hurl his defiance from Trieste itself.
And if the deliberate provocativeness at which he has pitched his
propaganda has brought upon him the venomous hatred of both numerous
and powerful enemies, it has merely served to give but an additional
fillip to the fury of his impetus.
It is indeed not only amusing, but also an indication of the man's
verve and defiance, to remember that when he had been hissed for
a whole hour on end in the Theatre Mercadante of Naples, where he
was delivering a lecture, and an apparently quite edible orange was
eventually thrown at him, he should with fine _bravura_ take out
his penknife and both peel and eat the orange. In Italy, at any
rate, Futurism has swept the universities, and the disciples of the
new faith number 50,000. Endeavouring to give to the campaign a
cosmopolitan significance, the Futurists have carried their pictures,
their manifestos, and their books to Madrid, to Berlin, to Paris
(where they were enthusiastically toasted by the "Association Générale
des Etudiants," the Parisian equivalent of the Oxford and Cambridge
Unions), and even to England itself, which, with a surprising lack of
its usual insularity, would actually appear to be taking an intelligent
interest in a new movement without waiting, as was the case with
Nietzscheanism, until it has first become the respectable if _passée_
object of the devotion of Continental academicism.
Before we proceed on our short survey of the chief works of M.
Marinetti, which have been written in French and only subsequently
translated into Italian, it is necessary to make some brief mention
of the new technique which he employs. This new technique is Free
Verse, first introduced into French literature in the _Palais Nomades_
of M. Gustave Kahn. It should be remembered, of course, that French
Free Verse is an article totally distinct from that mixture of rolling
dithyramb and conversational slap-dash which characterises the work of
Walt Whitman.
So far indeed as M. Gustave Kahn is concerned, the innovation
simply consisted not in any repudiation of rhyme in itself, but in
the emancipation of French verse from the strait-waistcoat of the
Alexandrine and the strict disciplinary rules of academic composition.
M. Marinetti, on the other hand, in the three volumes which it is now
proposed to consider, viz. _La Conquête des Étoiles_ (Sansot, 1902),
_Destruction_ (Vanier, 1904), _La Ville Charnelle_ (Sansot, 1908),
carries the metrical revolution considerably further. For while the
essence of classicism itself when compared with the polyphonic though
at times majestic ebullitions of Walt Whitman, they subserve no
specific rule. Metre, genuine metre, is invariably present, but the
precise shape which it happens to take is determined by the exigencies
not of the particular metre in which the poet happens to be writing,
but of the particular mood or emotion which clamours for expression
in the form most specifically appropriate to its own particular
idiosyncrasies. If, in fact, we may endeavour to crystallise the theory
of this verse, which though free from mechanical restraint is always
subordinate to the command of its own dynamic soul, we should say that
it is simply the principle of onomatopœia carried from the sphere of
words to the sphere of metre.
In the _Conquête des Étoiles_ the twenty-four-year-old Marinetti,
with the characteristic verve of audacious adolescence, essays to open
the oyster of the poetical world with the sword of a romantic epic.
Bearing evidence at times, in its grandiose anthropomorphism of natural
phenomena, of the influence of "his old masters the French Symbolists,"
the poem of this future champion of a concrete modernity challenges,
at any rate in the gigantic massing of its imagery, that grandiose
if somewhat bourgeois romantic Victor Hugo. For here poetic Pelion
is piled upon poetic Ossa with the most drastic vengeance. For the
Sovereign Sea, chanting her inaugural battle-cry,
"Hola-hé! Hola-ho! Stridionla, Stridionla, Stridionla!
Stridionlaire!"
to her ancient waves, puissant warriors with venerable beards of foam,
lashes them to conquer Space and mount to the assault of the grinning
Stars. And missiles are there in her Reservoir of Death--"petrified
bodies, bodies of steel, embers and gold, harder than the diamond,
the suicides whose courage failed beneath the weight of their heart,
that furnace of stars, those who died for that they stoked within
their blood the fire of the Ideal, the great flame of the Absolute
that encompassed them." And for an army has she the legions of her
amazon cavalry, the veterans of the Sea, the great waves, the riotous,
prancing narwhals with their scaly rings, the typhoons, the cyclones
and the haughty trombes (water-spouts), "draping around their loins
their fuliginous veils, or lifting masses of darkness in their great
open arms." And so this feud of the elements proceeds from climax to
climax, from crescendo to crescendo, till the astral fortresses succumb
to the shock of an infernal charge, and the last star expires "with her
pupils of grey shadow imploring the Unknown, oh how sweetly."
No doubt the poem almost reels at times as though intoxicated with
the excesses of its own imagery. Yet making all due discount for this
healthy turgidity of adolescence, it is impossible to dispute the
authentic poetical value of this brilliant epic.
By so masterly a grasp is the metre handled that the reader, quite
oblivious of the immaterial question of whether he is perusing verse
or prose, is only conscious of the ideas and emotions themselves.
The following passage is typical not only of the poem's potency of
expression, but of the intimate union which is effected between the
meaning and the form.
"C'est ainsi que passe le Simoun,
aiguillonant sa furie de désert en désert,
avec son escorte caracolante
de sables soulevés tout ruisselants de feu;
c'est ainsi que le Simoun galope
sur l'océan figé des sables,
en balangant son torse géant d'idole barbare
sur des fuyantes croupes d'onagres affolés."
In the series of poems, however, known as _Destruction_,
"Since there is only splendour in this word of terror
And of crushing force like a Cyclopæan hammer,"
that boyish robustness which we have seen playing so naïvely in the
romantic limbo, has attained the solidity of manhood. Finding it no
longer necessary to have recourse for his subject-matter to some set
theme of an Elemental War, the author reproduces the experiences of
his own inner life in a new lyrical language, whose rhythm vibrates
responsively to every thrill of its creator's spirit, and takes
faithfully every colour of his chameleon soul.
For the poet is now reverential:
"Tu es infinie et divine, o Mer, et je le sais
de par le jurement de tes lèvres, écumantes
de par ton jurement que répercutent de plage en plage
les echos attentifs ainsi que des guetteurs."
now jocund:
"O Mer, mon âme est puerile et demande un jouet";
now, almost sensually, adoring:
"O toi ballerina orientale au ventre sursautant,
dont les seins sont rouges par le sang des naufrages";
now sunk in the abject ecstasies of opium:
"Derrière des vitres rouges des voix rauques criaient
'De la moelle et du sang pour les lampdes d'oubli
C'est le prix des beaux rêves!... c'est le prix....'
Et j'entrais avec eux au bouge de ma chair";
now gentle:
"C'est pour nous que le Vent las de voyages eternels,
désabusé de sa vitesse de fantôme,
froissant d'une main lasse, au tréfonds de l'espace,
les velours somptueux d'un grand oreiller d'ombre
tout diamantés de larmes siddrales";
now bitterly conscious of the ironic raillery of the sea:
"Vos caresses brûlantes, vos savantes caresses,
sont pareilles à des tâtonnements d'aveugles
qui vont ramant par les couloirs d'un labyrinthe!
Vos baisers out toujours l'acharnement infatigable
d'un dialogue enragé entre deux sourds
emprisonnés au fond d'un cachot noir."
Even more characteristic of the feverish, but not unhealthy ardour of
the book is that series of ten poems entitled _Le Démon de la Vitesse_,
a kind of railway journey of the modern soul. For now the poet, stoking
the engines of his pounding brain with the monstrous coals of his own
energy, drives his train of Æschylean images (well equipped with all
the latest modern inventions) with all the record-breaking rapidity of
some Trans-American express, from the "vermilion terraces of love,"
across "Hindu evenings," "tyrannical rivers," "avenging forests,"
"milleniar torrents," and "the dusky corpulence of mountains," to
traverse "the delirium of Space," and "the supreme plateaux of an
absurd Ideal," to end finally in the grinding shock of a collision and
all the agony of a shipwrecked vessel. It is in this series of poems
that the author's wealth of imagery, always superabundant, lavishes its
most profound and incessant exuberance.
For such phrases as "the drunken fulness of streaming stars in the
great bed of heaven," "oh, folly, my folly, oh, Eternal Juggler," "O
wind, crucified beneath the nails of the stars," "the flesh scorched in
the burning tunic of a terrible desire," "the sad towns crucified on
the great crossed arms of thewhite road" are not mere isolated flashes
of poetical riches, but casual samples of an opulence displaying
itself on this same grandiose scale throughout every line of every
poem. Note, also, that the poet has completely fused himself with the
whole scientific universe. He will thus portray a man in the terms of
some dynamic entity of mechanical science, which as likely as not will
itself be represented in terms of humanity. Contrast, for instance,
such phrases as--
"Les géantes pneumatiques de l'Orgueil," or "train
fougueux de mon âme,"
with--
"Colonnes de fumée, immenses bras de nègre,
annelés d'étincelles et de rubis sanglants."
To sum up the essential character of _Destruction,_ we would say that
releasing poetry from the shackles of the conventional subject-matter,
the conventional language, and the conventional metres to which it
had been so long confined, it lays the hitherto untravelled lines of
the speed and beauty of the whole of modern civilisation, with its
all-unexplored scientific and psychological regions, as it sings the
rushing rhapsody of the whole spirit of the twentieth century.
"I bid ye pant your fury and your spleen,
I reck not the long roarings of your wrath,
O galloping Simoons of my ambition,
Who heavily the city's threshold paw,
Nor ever shall ye cross her sensual walls,
Ye neigh in vain in my stopped ears, already
With rosy murmurs steeped and stupefied
(And subterranean voices of the deep),
Like spells of freshness full of the sea's song."
The above quotation may perhaps give such readers as have not the
luxury of the French language some faint shadow of the warm charm of
_La Ville Charnelle_, which, at any rate from the conventional standard
of ordinary æsthetic beauty, represents the zenith of M. Marinetti's
poetical achievement. For in his second volume of verse, our author
abandons the furious pace of his rushing modernity to sing the almost
sensual beauty of a tropical town, with "the silky murmur of its
African sea," its pointed "mosques of desire," and its "hills moulded
like the knees of women, and swathed in the linen billows of its
dazzling chalk." The swift piston rhythm of _Destruction_ is exchanged
for a measure which, though untrammelled by any tight convention, is
often clad in the Turkish trousers of some languorous rhyme, or slides
with the voluptuous swish of some blank alexandrine. But if the flood
of images has abated its turbulence to a serener beauty, it has not
thereby suffered any loss of volume, as is evidenced by such phrases
as "les molles éméraudes de prairies infinies," "la bouche éclatée des
horizons engloutisseurs," or "jusqu'au volant trapeze de ce grand vent
gymnaste."
Or take the following passage from _The Banjoes of Despair and of
Adventure_:
"Elles chantent, les benjohs hystériques et sauvages,
comme des chattes énervées par l'odeur de l'orage.
Ce sont des nègres qui les tiennent
empoignées violemment, comme on tient
une amarre que secoue la bourrasque.
Elles miaulent, les benjohs, sous leurs doigts frénétiques,
et la mer, en bombant son dos d'hippopotame,
acclame leurs chansons par des flic-flacs sonores
et des renaclements."
More aery and fantastic in their radiance are the _Little Dramas of
Light_, which in the same volume play outside the walls of _La Ville
Charnelle_. For pushing the pathetic fallacy to the extreme limit of
pantheism, or anthropomorphism, as one cares to put it, our author
constructs his miniature scenes out of the interplay of plants,
elements, and the very fabrics of human invention, all participating in
something of the mingled dash, despair, and desire which go to weave
the somewhat complex tissue of our ultra-modern humanity.
Even the titles of a few of these delicate poems give some idea of
their darting beauty--"The Foolish Vines and the Greyhound of the
Firmament" (the Moon), "The Life of the Sails," "The Death of the
Fortresses," "The Folly of the Little Houses," "The Dying Vessels,"
"The Japanese Dawn," "The Courtesans of Gold" (the Stars).
Observe, also, the eminently twentieth-century temperament of the
"coquettish vessels," who, "half-clothed in their ragged sails, and
playing like urchins with the incandescent ball of the sun," have yet
experienced "amid the disillusioned smile of the autumn evenings" the
desire for a fuller and more tumultuous life than is afforded by the
"ventriloquist soliloquies of the gurgling waters of the quays."
"C'est ainsi, c'est ainsi que les jeunes Navires
implorent affolées délivrance,
en s'esclaffant de tous leurs linges bariolés,
claquant au vent comme les lèvres brulées de fièvre.
Leurs drisses et leurs haubans se raidissent
tels des nerfs trop tendus qui grincent de désir,
car ils veulent partir et s'en aller
vers la tristesse affreuse (qu'importe?) inconsolable
et (qu'importe?) infinie
d'avoir tout savouré et tout maudit (qu'importe?)."
We can perhaps best formulate the dynamic _élan de vie_, which pulses
through every line of M. Marinetti's poems, by indulging in the
perversion of the great line of Baudelaire, so that we can give to our
poet for his motto:
"Je haïs la ligne qui tue le mouvement."
M. Marinetti's activity, however, is not limited to the sphere of
verse. In 1905 he published _Le Roi Bombance_ (_Mercure de France_),
a satyric tragedy, compound of the scarcely harmonious temperaments
of Rabelais and Maeterlinck, a wild extravaganza of anthropophagy and
resurrection, which satirises the prominent figures in contemporary
Italian politics, including the recently dead Crispi, Ferri, and
Tenatri, and contains withal a profound undercurrent of sociological
truth. _Poupées Electriques_ (Sansot) followed in 1909, a play which,
with all its brilliance and originality, somehow just misses the real
dramatic pitch.
Far more significant are the _belles lettres_ of _Les Dieux s'en vont
D'Annunzio reste_ (Sansot, 1908), with its steely dash of style and its
criticism at once singularly acute and delightfully malicious of the
official protagonist of all Italian culture, and the recently published
_Futurisme_ (Sansot, 1911).
But of all the works of M. Marinetti, the most impressive is the great
prose epic, _Mafarka Le Futuriste_. It is in the three hundred pages
of this novel, which describes the destructive and creative exploits
of a militant and intellectual African prince, that the Futurist
leader has given the most complete expression to the vehement surge
of his genius. In this book, the spirits of the East and of the West
strangely combine. The gross heat of an African sun beats incessantly
down upon these torrid pages, yet even the most oriental passages have
such a Homeric freshness of epic sweep as to render them immeasurably
cleaner than the sniggering indecencies of not a few of even the more
fashionable and respectable of our lady novelists. Incident follows
on incident, adventure on adventure, with the magic bewilderment of
some Arabian Night, an Arabian night illumined by the galvanic current
of some twentieth-century genie, as it flashes image after image on
the multicoloured sheet of some dancing cinematograph. The style
bounds with a lithe male crispness, in comparison with which even the
luxuriant and self-complacent flowers of D'Annunzio himself seem at
times to offer but rank and androgynous beauties.