HORACE B. SAMUEL (continued 5)

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.

How admirable, for instance, is such a passage as—

"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.

THE VOLCANO Ne'er have I slept; I labour endlessly, Enriching space with many a masterpiece That lives and dies in a day. Over the baking of the chiselled rocks Upon the vitrefaction of the many-coloured sands I keep my watch So well that the clay 'neath my fingers Will metamorphose To a porcelain of perfect rose, Which I shatter with the buffets of my steam. My accomplice is the Strait of Messina Which dozes in the dawn, couching white and glossy As an Angora cat... My accomplice is the Strait of Messina Lolling like a cushion of lazy turquoise silk, With soft Arabian words embroidered by the wake Of clouds and languorous sails, Words woven silently methinks With a fair silver thread upon the ocean's robe. The perfidious moon is my accomplice, The arch-courtesan of the painted stars, For nowhere are the moon's cajoleries So luring and persuasive. And nowhere does the moon cast such assiduous eyes To seduce the hard red funnels of the steamers, Those surly strollers South With a fat cigar in their mouth Whose smoke they spit against the azure sky. And nowhere does the moon throw such a tender shower Of soft and violet ashes, As that which lulls to sleep the lava petrified On the black houses hanging on my flanks. And nowhere has the moon such poignancy Of inundations of light and ecstasy, As on the gashed paths Carved by my surgical fire. But woe to those who follow the bleating light of the moon, And the plaintive bells of the flocks, And the bitter flutes of the shepherds whose world-weary notes Are long, long threads that vanish in the blue! Woe to those who refuse to make their galloping blood Keep step with the gallop of the blood of my devastation! And woe to those who wish to root their heads, To root their feet and houses In a craven hope of eternity! A truce to building, for ye must encamp! Nay, am I not shaped even as a tent Whose truncated top fanneth my wrath? I only love the acrobatic stars Who balance on the rolling balls of smoke Wherewith I juggle! MYSELF I can dance to them, and juggle in mid air, And shower my song on the reverberations Of thy storms that breed In subterranean depths!... And I descend To hear the diapasons of thy voice. So make a pause In the electrical discharges of thy tubes That tear from thy base the underlying rocks. Enjoin to silence all thy babbling grottoes, That all a-flutter quiver ceaselessly. Gag with thick cinders The basaltic echoes whose chorus rings thy praise. What good are thy volcanic bombs That serve as punctuations for the growlings of thy speech? And what care I for the ruddy jets Of thine aggressive foam? Thy deluges of mud have soiled my wings of white, But check me not, for proof against thine avalanche Of scoria I descend, gilded and aureoled By all the powdery shower of thy dumbfounded gold.

It is also relevant to mention that M. Marinetti has been recently formulating new rules and principles for his new literary code. Among the more drastic phases of this stylistic revolution we would mention the employment of mathematical signs and symbols, the rebellion from too rigid and pedantic a syntax, the minimum use of the adjective and the infinitive, the opening up of new fields of images and metaphors, and the freer and more increased use of onomatopœia. These ideas are succinctly, though no doubt extravagantly, set out in the two manifestos entitled Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty and The Futurist Anti-Tradition.

Space vetoes more than the enumeration of the other Futurist poets—Luccini, Palazzescho, Folgore, and Altomare—though we may perhaps mention the recently published Poesie Electrichie of Govoni, and the A Claude Debussy of Paolo Buzzi, which won the first prize of the first international competition of "Poesia," and which transfers into a marvellously fluid Italian verse the at once ethereal and faunish emotions of the composer's music.

But if, finally, we may speculate on the Future of Futurism, its real prospects and its real significance are to be found in the fact that, though extravagant and aggressive, it is in essence a concentrated manifestation of the whole vital impetus of the twentieth century. Its relationship to Nietzscheanism we have already examined. Almost equally close is its affinity to the standpoints of such representative spirits of the real genius of this particular age as Verhaeren and Mr. Wells; Verhaeren, the gazer on the Multiple Splendour of the Tumultuous Forces of the Visages of Life, with his motto, "Life is to be mounted and not to be descended; the whole of life is in the soaring upwards," who expresses in the strenuous majesty of his verse the whole raging complex of our psychological and material civilisation; Mr. Wells, too, the glorifier of all the new machinery of our scientific fabric; Mr. Wells, who, with all his intoxication for the "gigantic syntheses of life," expresses himself most effectually by the maxim, "The world exists for and by initiative, and the method of initiative is individuality."

Even if we go to more concrete and more topical manifestations, there is not wanting evidence that the fiery blast of the Futurists is fanned by the huge bellows of our own labouring Zeitgeist.

If indeed we may meddle with the very latest metaphysical terminology, we would suggest that it is by a singularly brilliant and apposite stroke of intuition on the part of, the newly discovered élan de vie that, at a time which is moving at an unprecedented rapidity, at a time when the two great brother nations of the Teutonic race are preparing their rival sacrifices for the God of War with all the mocking and drastic fraternity of a Cain and of an Abel; when the air is thick with the wings of a new and regenerated France; when the militant mænads of both the West and the East, under the inspiration of their dashing and elusive Pythoness, are waging with foaming fanaticism a Holy War of Sex; when even one of the most responsible of our lawyers is coquetting dangerously with both the theory and the practice of the superior ethical value of Active Resistance; when the most venerable of our Lord Justices recently interpolated a homily on the Law of Change into the middle of an otherwise purely legal judgment; when the two young, but patriotic condottieri of either political party are fast leaping into a more and more aggressive prominence; when the insurgent masses of our industrial proletariat have made a vehement and not entirely unsuccessful charge against existing economic fabric of the country; when Mr. Thomas Hardy has attended, in the pages of even the Fortnightly Review, the funeral of the old God of pity, and when Bergsonism, judiciously advertised in the masquerade of a religious revival, has replaced the old Eternal Absolute with the creative activity of an endless Movement, the Futurists should now exalt the sublime vehemence of war, and the aggressive fury of youth, while M. Marinetti chants the strident hallelujahs of the new God of sweat and agony and tension, and Signor Russolo and his confrères exhibit to us in the actual canvases of the Sackville Galleries the rampant hordes of rebellion and the painting of Movement itself.

INDEX Abel, 237 Advent, 110 Æschylus (cf. Corelli), 115 Alcibiades, 61 Almansor, 32 Alroy, 55 Altomare, 236 Amour, De l', 13, 14 Anatol, 161, 176-9 Anne Veronica, 120 Anti-Semite, 115, 190 Anti-Semitism, 115 Antoine, 98 Aphrodite, 129 Arabian Nights, 144 Ardath, 114, 115 Aristotle, 74 Armance, 15-16 Athanasius, 89 Attila, 117 Aubes, Les, 210 Austria, 215 Awkward Age, The, 153 BALFOUR, Mr., 123 Balzac, 38, 201 Banti, Consultation de, 9 Barker, 162 Barrie, J. M., 132 Baths of Lucca, 35 Baudelaire, 121, 144, 154 Beaconsfield. See Disraeli Beardsley, 144 Belgium, 197 Bergson, 208 Bergsonism, 238 Berlioz, 38, 44 Beyle. See Stendhal Beyond the Rocks, 128 Bible, 89, 120 Bigillon, 5 Birrell, 64 Björnsen, 98 Black Flags, 95, 100, 111-113 Blake, 219 Blatchford, Robert, 132 Blés Mouvants, Les, 210 Bohair, 38 Bond, The, 104 Book of Songs, 30, 31, 35, 36, 49 Borgia, 86 Borne, 38, 39 Bottomley, Horatio, 119 Bourget, 24 Bovary, Madame, 16 Boy, 115 Brandes, 71 Brieux, 188 Browning, 63 Brummel, 61 Bryce, 60 Büchse von Pandora, 138, 145, 149, 150, 155 Buddhism, 72 Burne-Jones, 219 Buzzi, 236 Byron, 30, 52, 93 CAIN, 81, 237 Call of Life, 175-6 Campagnes Hallucinés, 202-4 Carlyle, 44, 66 Carpani, 11 Casanova, 64 Catholicism, 39, 110 Cervantes, 30 Chant, Mrs. Ormiston, 133 Chartreuse de Parme, 20, 21 Chateaubriand, 6 Chauvinism, 215 Chesterton, G. K., 119, 198 Christ, 71, 110, 118, 208 Childe Harold, 52 Christianity, 71, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 88, 93; Electric Principle of, 114 Comédie Humaine, 16 Confession of a Fool, 95, 97, 105-8 Congreve, 187 Conquête des Étoiles, 223-5 Conrad, 52 Conservatism, 67 Contarini Fleming, 55, 62 Corelli, Miss Marie, 114-33 Countess Mizzi, 161, 184 Court Theatre, 139 Craigie, Mrs., 69 Creditor, The, 103 Crispi, 230 Crowley, Aleister, 114 Crown Bride, 111 Damascus, To, 110 Dämmerseelen, 191 D'Annunzio, 210, 214, 231 Daru, 3, 4, 9, 12, 18 Darwin, 84, 136 Death Dance, 97, 110-11 Débâcles, Les, 199 Debussy, 219 Dembowska, Countess, 12 Democracy, 67 Démon de la Vitesse, 212, 226 De Profundis, 140 Destruction, 223, 225 Deutschland, 40 Disraeli, 50-69 Disraeli, Mrs., 62, 63, 68 Don Juan, 19, 50, 97, 215 Dorian Gray, 132 D'Orsay, 61 Dowie, Dr., 117 Dream Pictures, 30, 32 Drury Lane, 122 Dugazon, 7 Dumas, 38 Easter, 110 Ehre, Die, 136 Einsame Weg, Der, 171, 172 Eldon, 67 Elizabeth's Visits to America, 128 Embarrassments, 177 Endymion, 52 Erdgeist, 134, 135, 145-9 Essen, Siri von, 95 Esther Waters, 129 Eugenics, 154 FAGUET, 24 Fakredeen, 52 Father, The, 101, 102 Faust, 158 Ferri, 230 Feuerwerk, 154 Fichte, 74 Flamands, Les, 198, 199 Flambeaux Noirs, 199-202 Fleurs du Mal, 121 Foote, G. W., 119 Forces Tumultueuses, 196 Foundations of Belief, 123 France, 214, 237 Franziska, 155, 157-9 Frau Margit, 95 Free Love, 139, 154 Free Opinions, 119 Free Verse, 223 Freiwild, 173-5 Froude, 51 Frühlingserwachen, 135, 145, 150-3, 159 Futurism, 212-38 GALSWORTHY, 157, 159, 162, 163 Gambetta, 67 Garvice, Charles, 116 Gautier, 38 Geheimniss der Gilde, 95 Genealogy of Morals, 70-90 Genesis, 119 Germany, 72, 135-9 Gladstone, 53, 54, 61, 65, 66, 68 Gluckspeter, 95 Glyn, Elinor, 126-30 God's Good Man, 122 Goethe, 74, 144 Gog, 208 Govoni, 236 Green Cockatoo, 161, 182-3 Guilbert, Mélanie, 7 Gull, Ranger, 115 HALEVY, Jehudah, 43 Hallucinated Country-sides, 202-4 Hannele, 137 Hardy, 238 Hart, Julius, 137 Harzreise, 34 Hauptmann, 137, 210 Haydn and Mozart, Lives of, 11 Heimkehr, 34 Heine, 26-49, 60, 77, 89 Heine, Amalie, 31, 32 Heine, Samson, 29 Heine, Solomon, 30 Hélène de Sparte, 210 Heliogabalus, 121 Hermant, Abel, 122 Hidalla, 154 Higher Criticism (Corelli), 119 His Hour, 128 History of Painting in Italy, 12 Hitchman, 50 Hobbes, 83 Hofmann, 28 Hogarth, 150 Holy Alliance, 27 Holy Orders, 121 Hugo, 38, 224 Humboldt, 38 IBSEN, 153 Idealists, 87 Ihering, 85 In Allen Satteln Gerecht, 156 In Allen Wassern Gewaschen, 156 Inferno, 109 Ingersoll, 119 Intoxication, 110 Isaiah, 72, 133 Israel, 71, 78 Italian Travels, 11 Italy, 35, 213 JACK the Ripper, 149 James, Henry, 137, 153, 177, 187 Jeremiah, 72 Jesuits, 118 Jesus, 71, 72 Jew-Millionaires, 121 Jews, 118 Jezebels, Upper-Ten, 121, 127 Job, 111 Johannes, 137 Josepha, 30 Journal, Le, 24 Judæa, 78 Julien, 17-20 Junge Leiden, 35 Juvenal, 133 KABLY, Mdlle., 3 Kahn, Gustave, 223 Kammersänger, Der, 140-142 Kant, 40, 87 Karl Moor, 19 Key, Ellen, 88, 96 Kipling, 110, 234 Klinger, 219 LAFAYETTE, 38 Lamiel, 22-23 Lebendige Stunden, 177, 180-182 Legends, 109 Les Dieux s'en vont D'Annunzio reste, 230 Lesbos, 131 Liebelei, 164-166, 169 Liebestrank, Der, 153 Life Force, 145 "Little Mary,"132 Longfellow, 153 Louason, 7, 8 Louis XVI, 2 Louis Philippe, 21 Louÿs, 115, 129 Loyola, 117 Luccini, 236 Lucien Leuwen, 21-22 Lyrisches Intermezzo, 32, 35, 36 MADONNA, 96, 97 Maeterlinck, 197, 230 Mafarka le Futuriste, 129, 231, 232 Maine, 81, 84 Märchen, Das, 167, 168 Marinetti, 129, 212-238 Marionetten, 177, 179 Marius the Epicurean, 124 Marquis von Keith, 153 Marriage, 98-100 Masken und Wunder, 191 Mate, The, 183 Maupassant, 98, 191 Maupin, Mademoiselle de, 157 Meade, L. T., 116 Medardus, Der Junge, 184-186 Meissner, 38 Meister Olof, 94 Meister, Wilhelm, 55 Melville, Walter, 115 Mighty Atom, The, 115 Milan, 4, 12, 13, 213 Milton, 210 Minnehaha, 153 Mirbeau, Octave, 122 Mirat, Matilde, 41 Miss Julie, 102, 103 Mit Allen Hünden Gehetzt, 156 Moines, Les, 199 Molière, 3, 121 Monna Vanna, 140 Moore, George, 106 Motherly Love, 104 Mouche, La, 48 Multiple Splendeur, Le, 208-209 Murder of Delicia, 115 Musik, 155, 156, 157 NAPOLEON, 29, 30, 69 Nerval, Gérard de, 38 New England, 67, 153 New Machiavelli, 105, 120 New Woman Movement, 96 Nietzsche, 24, 70-90, 136, 144, 208, 216 Nirvana, 73 Nonconformity, 119 Nordsee Cyklus, 33, 34 Northcliffe, 86 Nouvelle Héloïse, 3 Oaha, 154 O'Connell, 57 O'Connor, T. P., 50 Open Sea, The, 100, 108 Opportunism, 67 Orestes, 81 Ovid, 144 PALAZZESCHO, 236 Papacy, 213 Peel, 64 Péladan, 131 Pietragrua, Countess, 4, 10, 12 Pinero, 145 Plain Dealer, The, 141 Playing with Fire, 97, 104-105 Poe, 154 Poesia, 221, 236 Poetische Nachlese, 35, 47 Pope's Monoplane, The, 233-236 Professor Bernhardi, 188-190 Przybyszewski, 109 Puppet-player, 179-180 QUEUX, Le, 116 Racine and Shakespeare, 14, 15 Ratcliff, 32 Raymond, Jack, 119 Realism, 138 Red Room, 95 Reigen, 179 Reisebilder, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 49 René, 19 Restoration, French, 17 Revolution, French, 27, 28, 53 Revolutionary Epicke, 67 Rhythmes Souveraines, Les, 210 Richter, 38 Risorgimento Italiano, 213 Road to the Open, The, 192-194 Robespierre, 40 Rockefeller, 86 Rodenbach, 197, Rodin, 211 Romance of Two Worlds, 114 Romantic School, The, 40 Romanticism, 14, 27, 28, 138 Romanzero, 35, 47, 48 Rome, 79, 213 Rome, Naples, and Florence, 11 Roosevelt, President, 116 Rossetti, 219 Rossini, Life of, 15 Rouge et le Noir, Le, 9, 16, 17-20, 56, 185 Rousseau, 46, 83 Rubens, 197 Russolo, 220, 238 Salome, 140 Sand, 38 Sappho, 131 Satan, 208 Satan, Sorrows of, 114 Schiller, 144 Schlegel, 38 Schloss von Wetterstein, 155, 156 Schnitzler, 161-195 Schopenhauer, 72, 73, 74, 144 Secessionists, 140 Secessionsbühne, 137 Sefchen, 30 Selden, Camille, 48 Self-and-Sex Series, 130 Semites, 125 Serialese, Manual of, 133 Severini, 220 Shaw, G. B., 126, 135, 155, 159, 162, 163 Sichel, 51 Sidonia, 52 Smiles, Samuel, 115 Smith, Adam, 7 Socialists, 88 Sorel, Julien, 16-20 Souvenirs d'Egotisme, 24 Spencer, 77 Spring's Awakening, 115. See Frühlingserwachen St. Amand, 197 St. Barbe, 197 St. Beuve, 24 Staël, Mme. de, 40 Stage Society, 139, 161, 162 Stendhal, 1-25, 74, 185 Sterne, 30 Stratford-on-Avon, 131 Strauss, 219 Strife, 163 Strindberg, 91-113 Stuck, 219 Sudermann, 88, 137 Suffragette, 96 Superman, 75, 80 85, 87, 136, 163 Sutro, 162 Swan, Annie, 116 Swan White, 111 Sweden, 96 Swedenborgianism, 110 Swedish Destinies, 98 Swedish Miniatures, 111 Swift, 30, 44 Swiss Tales, 100 Switzerland, 215 Symbolists, 224 TAINE, 20, 24, 136 Tamerlane, 86 Tancred, 55, 60, 65 Tanner, John, 97 Tartuffe, 121 Technique, 163 Temporal Power, 120, 124 Tenatri, 230 Tentacular Towns, 202-205 Terminations, 177 Thelma, 119, 124 Thorne, Guy, 115 Three Weeks, 127, 130 Thucydides, 132 Tolstoi, 76, 126 Tories, 65, 66, 67 Torquemada, 117 Totentanz, 126, 135, 142-4 Tracy, 7 Turn of the Screw, 137 UHL, Frida, 109 Ultramontanes, 21 Ultramontanism, 115 VAN Lenburgh, 197 Veil of Beatrice, 169-171 Vendetta, 115 Venetia, 56 Verhaeren, 196-211, 237 Verlaine, 154, 200 Vermächtniss, Die, 169 Versunkene Glocke, Die, 137 Vie de Henri Brulard, La, 24 Vier Jahrzeiten, Die, 154 Ville Charnelle La, 223, 228-230 Villes Tentaculaires, Les, 202-205 Visages de la Vie, Les, 208 Vivian Grey, 19, 52, 55, 56, 59 Voltaire, 42, 46, 77, 89 Voynich, Mrs., 119 WAGNER, 73 Ward, Mrs., 126 Waste, 163 Weber, Die, 136, 210 Wedekind, 98, 126, 134-160 Weg ins Freie, Der, 192-194 Weites Land, Das, 184, 186-188 Wells, 237 Werther, 19 Westermarck, 84 Whigs, 65, 66, 67 Whitman, Walt, 223 Wilde, 89, 139, 140 Will to Live, 73 Williams, Mrs. Brydges, 63 Woman with the Dagger, 180-182 Women atheists, 118 Wormwood, 115 Wycherley, 141 YOUNG Men's Christian Association, 215 Zarathustra, 70, 80-3, 88 Zensur, 155, 156 Zwischenspiel, 172, 173 Zola, 118, 136, 145