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,