"And Mafarka-el-Bey bounded forward, with great elastic
steps, sliding on the voluptuous springs of the wind and
rolling--like a word of victory--in the very mouth of
God";
or such a perfect Homeric simile as--
"All the beloved sweetness of his vanished youth mounted
in his throat, even as from the courtyard of schools
there mount the joyous cries of children towards their
old masters, leaning over the parapet of the terrace
from which they see the flight of the vessels upon the
sea";
or such a perfect description as--
"Et d'en haut descendaient les rayons des étoiles des
milliers de chainettes dorées tintinabulantes, qui
balançaient au ras de l'eau leurs tremblants reflets,
innombrables veilleuses."
But the wondrous story of how Mafarka-el-Bey exhorted to the work of
war the thousands of his wallowing soldiers from the putrescent bed
of that dried-up lake; of how, disguising himself as an aged beggar,
he visited the camp of the negroes; of the monstrous tale which he
there told his Ethiopian foes; of the stratagem by which he drew the
two pursuing wings of the infatuated army to the stupendous shock of
an internecine collision; of how he annihilated the maddened hordes of
the Hounds of the Sun with the stones flung by the mechanical Giraffes
of War; of the Neronian banquet in the grotto of the Whale's Belly; of
the agonised hydrophobic death of his brother Magamal, the light of his
eyes; of the nocturnal journey in which he conveyed across the sea his
brother's body in a sack to the land of the Hypogeans; of the Futurist
Discourse which he there held; of his passing encounter with the
fellahin Habbi and Luba; of how, disdaining the more banal method of
filial creation, he compelled the weavers of Lagahourso and the smiths
of Milmillah to make the body of that Airgod Gazourmeh, whose spirit he
had fashioned out of the glory of his own unaided brain; and of how he
died exultantly, brushed away beneath the gigantic wings of his son, as
it flew like some hilarious parricide into the clear infinitude, is it
not all written in the pages of _Mafarka Le Futuriste_? (E. Sansot &
Cie, Paris, 3 fr. 50 c.)
Note, also, the religious exultation of martial and intellectual
energy, whose hoarse prayer is uttered on almost every page. For
Mafarka is the prophet of that "new voluptuousness which shall have
rid the world of love when he shall have founded the religion of the
concrete will and of the heroism of every single day."
And to still further exemplify his new religion of war and energy,
and inspired, too, no doubt by the airy message of the Arab bullets,
M. Marinetti finished on the 29th November 1911 in the trenches of
Sidi-Missri, near Tripoli, the great free-verse epic of three hundred
and fifty pages, entitled _The Popes Monoplane_. The function of this
poem, which is certainly the most original epic known to literary
history, is to serve as an anti-clerical, an anti-pacifist, and
anti-Austrian polemic. And this function it accomplishes by a technique
which in its successful audacity transcends even itself. For nowhere
is the free verse of Marinetti more free. New harmonies and even new
dissonances are conjured up according to the emotion to be expressed
and the object to be described, while the terminology of mechanics
and physiology is judiciously mingled with just a trace of the old
romanticism. The whole epic quite literally flies with inordinate
swiftness. For the poet is, on his monoplane, careering over the heart
of Italy. He takes counsel of his father the volcano, and, flying back
to Rome, fishes up by means of an iron chain with a spring-trap the
great polished Seal, or, as he exultantly describes it,
"Un pape, un vrai pape, le saint Pontif lui-même."
And on he flies on his missionary career, with the miserable Vicar of
God dangling helplessly beneath him, now present at the debates of
_Les Moucherons Politiciens_, now assisting at the tumultuous congress
of _Les Syndicate Pacifistes_, now side by side with the moon, now
exhorting the Italian youth to shake off their execrable lethargy,
and, finally, participating in the eventual overthrow of the Austrian
enemy. This poem marks an immense advance on the earlier epic, _La
Conquête des Étoiles_, to which we have already referred. It pullulates
with an equal energy, but this energy is tenser and far less turgid. It
is an energy, moreover, whose impetus is expended not on imaginative
abstractions, but on the drastic attack of concrete political problems.
As a sheer piece, too, of description, Marinetti's description of the
_Battle of Monfalcone_ is in our view superior to any of the military
verse even of Kipling himself. _The Pope's Monoplane_ is, of course, an
aggressively specific example of realism in poetry. But it is a realism
which, so far from clipping the wings of Pegasus, rather spurs him to
higher and more strenuous flights. We may perhaps conclude our survey
of this work by an endeavour to render into English a characteristic
passage from the dialogue between the Poet and the Volcano.