"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scrutiny of this "Rising City" of Futurism, as it rears with such vehement exaltation from out the trampled debris of a superseded and dishonoured past.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.