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,