There is nothing which mirrors the individual and composite mind of a country so illuminatingly as its literature. The man craving for power prefers the allegiance of a country's song-writers to that of its lawgivers. That a tremendous change has taken place to-day, not only in the songs of Italy but in all her literature, must be admitted. This change has been in process for a generation and is going on with increasing rapidity.
Italian literature is now going through a phase quite as distinct as that which characterized the romanticism initiated by Manzoni and which ended with the advent of Carducci. It would be difficult to find a word which would adequately express the spirit of it—perhaps the most descriptive one is protest. The new writers protest against the social, political, and religious acceptances of the past fifty years. They object to the acceptance of alleged facts substantiated only by tradition; they refuse adherence to teachings, doctrines, modes of thought and expression merely because they are old; they reject dogma originating in self-constituted authority, no matter how long or by whom it has been sanctioned and privileged, no matter how securely rooted. They will have none of the conventionalism which is out of harmony with the present conditions of life and with the present yearning for liberty. They stand against the teaching that the flesh must be punished in order that the soul may be purified, as they do against all slavish stereotypy, moss-covered convention, and archaic laws.
They claim instead that the best of life is to be found in purposeful action; that life should be speeded up, and that every one should be encouraged to live fully for the advantage that may come to himself, to those to whom he is beholden, and to the world. They advocate the strenuous life and invite the new and unforeseen, while urging exploration of untrodden fields and especially determination of things called inaccessible and unrealizable. They advocate equal life for men and women, and seek to give to such words as "patriotism" and "idealism" a fuller significance, so that the former shall not mean the heroic idealization of commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a people but a love of liberty and a knowledge, recognition, and appreciation of what other people and other countries are attempting and accomplishing; and that the latter may be applied to the affairs of life and not to the affairs of the imagination.
This movement, in Italy, was begun by a group of men who called themselves Futurists and, if that name can be dissociated from the connotation that is given to it when applied to art, I see no objection to it. It has been influenced by the French Symbolists of the preceding generation, Baudelaire, de Goncourt, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Huysmans, Rimbaud, whose work so profoundly influenced the course of French literature. Like this school the self-styled futuristic writers of Italy revolt against rhetoric and against tradition. Therefore they reject equally the ardent classicism of Carducci and D'Annunzio's decadent blend of idealism and realism, the crass, slavish Gallicism of Brocchi, the Scandinavian genuflections of Bracco and the Shavian imitations of Pirandello. In protest against all these they seek the full liberty of the written word, as the evangel of socialism seeks the liberty of the individual. Not from other writers but from reality itself, or from the depths of their own imaginations, they have received a vision and this vision they demand the right to evoke in others, by what words or what images they will. The art of expression should be speeded up, abbreviated, and epitomized, while the love of profound essentials is cultivated. To borrow from England's singer of materialistic grandeur and promise, they
" ... want the world much more the world;
Men to men and women to women—all
Adventure, courage, instinct, passion, power."
And in addition, as true Futurists, they want us to have constantly in mind what happened to Lot's wife when she looked back to see how high the flames rose over Sodom and Gomorrah.
The leaders of the Futuristic movement in Italy were Guillaume Apollinaire, then editor of Les Soirées de Paris, and F. T. Marinetti of Milan.
One thing can be said of Signor Marinetti, the pope of Futurism, which no one, I fancy, will deny. He is the most amusing writer in Italy. His idea of beauty is a massive building of concrete in course of construction with the scaffoldings lovingly embracing it. His idea of ugliness is a curve of any kind—save in the feminine body. "Parole in libertà," words free from syntactical shackles are the words with which we shall fight the battle of the future. They are the dynamite which will blow asunder literary Monte Testaccio, in which are buried the useless literary labors of his forebears but which shall also prepare the soil for a fertility that it has never possessed. Dynamism is the master-key. No artificer of the past or wizard of the future can construct a lock that it will not readily open, and as for political manacles they are as fragile as rubber bands when confronted with the doctrines of his new book, "Democrazia Futurista."
Signor Marinetti has no delusions of grandeur; he only pretends that he has. Nor is he the victim of a mental disorder which is characterized by loss of insight and megalomania. It is gratifying to be able to make this diagnosis of one of Italy's literary leaders. It offsets the diagnosis of general paresis made of Woodrow Wilson by one of Mr. Marinetti's fellow citizens and published with such elaborate attempts of substantiation in the Giornale di Italia. He merely overestimates his intellectual and emotional possessions, but he says many clever things and makes some prophecies that are likely to come through. The last European ruler who talked and acted as Signor Marinetti does got a bad spill, as is now fairly widely known. In reality, Marinetti is a Bolshevik who amuses himself behind a mask, but not all the principles of Bolshevism are bad by any means, nor even are they new. The most telling way of making a statement is to overstate it. The most successful way of getting a bad smell out of a house is to burn the house; then, if you have a good plan and plenty of time, money, and building material, you can construct yourself a house free from bad odors. However, there are other ways of making it a very livable and beautiful house, but why one should object to Mr. Marinetti's building his own house his own way is difficult to understand, unless in so doing it he makes himself such a nuisance to his neighbors that they cannot tolerate him. So far he has not done that, but when he joins force with Signor Bruno Corra, as he has in "L'Isola dei Baci" ("The Island of Kisses"), he comes perilously near it.
Apollinaire, a Pole whose real name was Kostrowitski, was born in Rome and lived in Italy until late childhood, when he went to France, where he remained until his death in 1919. He had a tremendous influence upon many of the young symbolist writers of Italy, comparable to that exercised by Stéphane Mallarmé on the young writers in the '80's and '90's. One of them wrote at the time of his death: "Hero of thought and of art, idealist, philosopher, genuine poet, prophetic theorist and critic, sublime soul, comrade, joyous, generous, he was also in the last years of his life a hero of humanity."