Chapter 6

[1]"Der Freiwild" (sic); correct title is "Freiwild"—transcriber's note (M.D.)

[2]"Rohring" is "Rönning" in the original play—transcriber's note (M.D.)

"Mais les plus exaltés se dirent dans leur cœur,'Partons quand même avec notre âme inassouviePuisque la force et que la vieSont au delà des vérités et des erreurs.'""Vivre c'est prendre et donner avec liesse.Toute la vie est dans l'essor."

The above principles, prefixed to theForces Tumultueusesof Émile Verhaeren, are well fitted to supply the key to a man who both in thought and in technique is indisputably the most modern and the most massive force in the whole of contemporary European poetry. For Verhaeren is no narrow specialist with an outlook limited to some particular sphere. He is the singer of the whole fulness of modern European life as a whole, with its clashes, its complexities, its agonies and its tensions, its deserted country-sides and its pullulating metropoles, its armaments and its Armageddons, its brothels, cathedrals, laboratories and Stock Exchanges, its sciences and its sensualities, its arts, philosophies and aspirations. His muse is no serene nymph piping delicately on some Parnassian slope, but an extremely tumultuous Amazon, at once primeval, and ultra-modern, chanting the pæan of battle, steeped in the wine of victory, and suckling the supermen of the future on her universal breasts. No muse in the whole of literature is more highly charged with vitality, and no reader is qualified to enjoy her unless he, too, is charged to the maximum with "the red tonic liquor of a harsh and formidable reality."

Let us then glance first at the earlymilieuof aman who combines the exultant fury of the lyric with the wide outlook of the cosmopolitan sociologist, and who can incidentally beat both Baudelaire and Wordsworth at their own respective game.

Verhaeren was born on the 21st May 1855 at St. Amand in Belgium, one of the most strenuous countries in the modern world, which, it is interesting to remember, holds the European record for sensualism, alcoholism, and clericalism. St. Amand is situated on the broad plains of the Scheldt, and it is not unimportant to lay some stress on the Flemish ancestry and environment of a man who, though he wrote in the French language, is more Germanic than Gallic in his temperament, and who represents in the sphere of verse perhaps the nearest analogue to the crass majesty and red sensuality of Rubens. His early country upbringing, moreover, is responsible for thatjoie de vivrein the fields, and, above all, the wind, the symbolisation of fury and rebellion which was to inspire those nature lyrics, many of which are nearly as great, though by no means as interesting, as his cosmic and metropolitan poems.

Verhaeren was originally intended for the priest-hood, and was educated at the Jesuit school of St. Barbe in Ghent, where he had for his schoolfellows such men as Maeterlinck, Van Lenbergh, and Rodenbach. Leaving school, he went to Brussels, where he felt "his multiplied heart grow and become exalted" with the roaring intensity of metropolitan life. All thoughts of a holy life were now abandoned, and in 1881 the poet was called to the Bar. His chief interests, however, were literature, Socialism, and Brussels life. Joining the Young Belgian group under the leadership of Edmond Picard, he became a frequent contributor toL'Art ModerneandLa Jeune Belgique. Politically he was a Socialist, associatedhimself with the Socialist leader Vandervelde, and was one of the founders of the philanthropicMaison des Peuples.

But it was in the poetic representation of "the monstrous scenery of the crass Flemish Kermesses" (Les Flamands, 1883) that Verhaeren gave the first vent to his violent virility. In this work a Rubensesque and Rabelaisian subject-matter is treated with poetic exaltation by a man who found in the great national festivals of past and present Flanders, with

"Des chocs de corps, des heurts de chair et des bourrades,Des lèchements subis dans un etreignement,"

the same patriotic inspiration which Mr. G. K. Chesterton has discovered in that beer; into which he has, as it were, so successfully transubstantiated the whole national spirit of our English body-politic. Thus our poet wallows defiantly in the black roughness of his Flemish peasants:

"Les voici noirs, grossiers, bestiaux—ils sont tels,"

or casts regretful glances towards the healthier grossness of the artists of old Flanders:

"Vos pinceaux ignoraient le fard,Les indécences, les malices,Et les sous-entendus de viceQui clignent l'œil dans notre art,Vos femmes suaient la santé,Rouge de sang blanche de graisse,Elles menaient les ruts en laisseAvec des airs de royauté."

But these poems are far more than mere erotic or gastronomic diversions. Somewhat turgid, no doubt, with red health, they yet possess the same sweep and the same impetus with which Aristophanes himself once gave expression to the riotous fecundity of the earth and the Dionysian forces of nature.

InLes Moines(The Monks, 1886), Verhaeren treats a subject-matter whichprimâ faciewould seem to denote the abandonment of the cult of the flesh for the cult of the spirit. Yet such veneration as the poet may ever have possessed for the Catholic creed was æsthetic rather than religious. He penetrates, it is true, into the "enormous shrine where the Middle Ages slumber," but it is less to worship than to describe in a rigid, but majestic prosody "the grand survivors of the Christian world"—the

"Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiquesMais dont l'âme mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain."

Psychologically the interesting feature of this work is that, so far from being in any way obsessed by any Chestertonian nostalgia for a dead and mediæval past, the poet anticipates with all apparent serenity the day when "the final blasphemy will have transpierced God like to an immense sword." Even, moreover, in these, as it were, antiquarian descriptions the poet emphasizes the contrast between the visionary life of the cloister (a life, albeit, where occasionally

"Un repas colossal souffle fourneaux béantsÉructant vers l'azur sa flamme et sa fumée")

and the real life of the outside world, and seems by no means unsympathetic to the rebellious monk who requires

"Le ciel torride et le désert et l'air des montsEt les tentations en rut des vieux demonsAgaçant de leurs doigts la chair enflée des gougesEn lui brûlant la lèvre avec de grands seins rouges."

Yet bothLes FlamandsandLes Moinesseem quite innocent and playful in comparison with the great black trinity ofLes Soirs, Les Débâcles, andLes Flambeaux Noirs(1887-1891), in which Verhaerengave expression to the mental and physical crisis which for a time seemed to imperil both his life and his reason. In these poems, many of which were written in London and its

"Gares de suie et de fumée ou du gaz pleureSes spleens d'argent lointain vers des chemins d'éclair,Où des bêtes d'ennui baillent à l'heureDolente immensément qui tinte à Westminster,"

Verhaeren leaves the objective mood of his earlier poems to clothe his soul in the Nessian shirt of the most poisonous subjectivity. But true tragic dignity stalks in the very extremity of his agony. Compared, indeed, with the gigantic bass of this unhappiness, black, definite, drastic, what is the grey wistfulness of Verlaine but the hysterical falsetto of a whining child? Verhaeren, on the other hand, with the ecstatic defiance of a kind of Nietzschean Prometheus sets himself to plumb the lowest abysses of despair, and himself eggs on the eagles of torment to devour every shred of his own soul. With "brutal teeth of fire and madness he bites and outrages his own heart within him," lashes himself in his thought and in his blood, in his effort, in his hope, in his blasphemy:

"Et quand lève le soir son calice de lieJe me le verse à boire insatiablement."

Or take again the sinister gusto of the passage:

"Aurai-j'enfin l'atroce joieDe voir nuits après nuits comme une proieLa démence attaquer mon cerveau,Et détraque, malade, sorti de la prisonEt des travaux forcés de sa raisonD'appareiller vers un lointain nouveau?"

The technique of these poems is worthy of some study. Having little use for the orthodox alexandrine (except in a few instances likeLe Gel,where the icy massiveness of the blocked couplets faithfully mirrors the polar desolation of his own soul), he fashions his own metres to incarnate his own moods. Such a refrain as "Ce minuit dallé d'ennui" will boom out again and again the dull monotonous clank of his own weary spirit. At other times the grinding engines of a disorganised mind whirr and jar with spasmodic feverishness:

"C'est l'heure où les hallucinés,Les gueux, et les déracinésDressent leur orgueil dans la vie."

Note, too, the ghastly effectiveness of the internal rhymes. Is not, for instance, such a line as

"Les chiens du noir espoir out aboyé ce soir"

a triple series, as it were, of metrical mirrors, where the bitten mind barks savagely back at its own mad image. Or listen to the Titanic thud of such a line as

"La Mer choque ses blocs de flots contre les rocs,"

or the silent smash of

"Dites suis-je seul avec mon âme,Mon âme hélas maison d'ébèneOù s'est fendu sans bruit un soirLe grand miroir de mon espoir?"

At times transcending the blank negativity of despair, the poet will coquet positively with his own madness, as he wanders "hallucinated in the forest of numbers," or wishes to march towards "madness and her suns, her white suns of moonlight in the great weird noon, and her distant echoes bitten by dins and barkings and full of vermilion hounds." Or abandoning the more specific formulation of his own emotions, he will give vent to his feelings by letting his brain dance upon the lurid boards of somemacabretheme. The little poem,La Tête, is dank with all the smoothbloodiness of the guillotine, while theDame en Noir, with the ghastly rhymes and assurances of its refrain, is swathed in a black pathos, in comparison with which the most lurid horrors of Baudelaire appear the mere artificial extravagances of a perverse mind.

As we have already seen, the blackness of the trilogy which we have just considered was no mere dabbling in morbidity, but the genuine expression of a genuine unhappiness. In, however,Les Apparus dans Mes Chemins, Les Vignes de Ma Muraillethe storm gradually exhausts itself, and is replaced by a more serene and confident mood. Contrast, for instance, with the drastic violence ofLes Débâclesthe jaded weariness of such a lyric asCelui de la Fatigue, where the poet sings of an "ardour broken on the whirling staircase of the infinite," or of such a passage as

"Je m'habille des loques de mes joursEt le bâton de mon orgueil il plie,Mes pieds dites comme ils sont lourdsDe me porter de me trainer toujoursAu long de siècle de ma vie."

And as a complete antithesis, again, to the black bloodiness of such poems asLa TêteorUn Meurtre,take the white suavity ofSt. Georges:

"Il vient un bel ambassadeurDu pays blanc illuminé de marbresOù dans les pares au bords des mers sur l'arbreDe la bonté suavement croit la douceur."

But this serenity marked rather a respite in Verhaeren's development than a real abatement of his poetic fury. With the furnaces of his mind recharged to their maximum capacity with blazing health, he starts to race his muse over the main lines of the modern civilisation, which lead fromThe Hallucinated Country-sidestoThe Tentacular Towns.Though written at different times, these two sets of poems constitute the contrasting halves of a complete whole, and were published together in 1895 with two prologues,La VilleandLa Plaine. The prologues, in particular, well illustrate the new rushing irregular prosody, specially forged for the purpose of hammering out that white-hot steel of the modern civilisation which enmeshes in its fabric all the helpless flotsam of the agricultural economy. The academic harmony of the alexandrine is here abandoned. The rhymes crash out at lesser and greater intervals as they march along on feet that range from the quick spasm of some dissyllabic line to the spondaic emphasis of a full-length alexandrine.

InLes Campagnes Hallucinésitself the prosody is no doubt simpler, as the poet describes the ruined and pestilential country with its fevers, its sins, its beggars, its pilgrims, its diseases, insanities and débauchés, and the immense monotony of its interminable plains.

"C'est la plaine, la plaine blêmeInterminablement toujours la même,Par au-dessus, souventRage si forte le vent,Que l'on dirait le ciel fenduAu coup de boxeDe l'équinoxe;Novembre hurle ainsi qu'un loupLamentable par le soir fou."

Perhaps, however, the most sinister poems inLes Campagnesare theChansons de Fou, with their naïf absurdities and their intuitive reason, where the rhymes laugh and clatter like rows of grinning teeth, and the almost DureresqueLe Fléau, from its exordium,

"La Mort a bu du sangAu cabaret des Trois CercueilsLa Mort a mis sur le comptoirUn écu noir,'C'est pour les cierges, pour les deuils,'"

down to its ghastly climax,

"Et les foules suivaient vers n'importent où,Le grand squelette aimable et soûlQui trimballait sur son cheval bonhommeL'épouvante de sa personne,Jusqu'aux lointains de peur et de panique,Sans éprouver l'horreur de son odeur,Ni voir danser, sous un repli de sa tunique,Le trousseau de vers blancs qui lui têtaient le cœur."

The final significance ofLes Campagneslies in its last poem,Le Départ, describing the desertion by the whole country-side of that dead mournful plain which is being eaten up by the town.

"Tandis qu'au loin là-basSous les cieux lourds fuligineux et gras,Avec son front comme un Thabor,Avec ses sugoirs noirs et ses rouges haleinesHallucinant et attirant les gens des plaines,C'est la ville que le jour plombe et que la nuit éclaireLa ville en plâtre, en stuc, en bois, en marbre, en fer, en or—Tentaculaire."

It is, however, inLes Villes Tentaculaires, where the fever and indefatigable aspiration of the town are described with a Zolaesque exaltation, that the originality of the departure initiated by Verhaeren is more specifically manifested. For he now boldly stalks forward as the pioneer realist in European poetry. Disregarding alike the orthodox subject-matter and the orthodox terminology of official poesy, he seeks and finds his inspiration in the vast forces at work in actual modern life. The realism of Verhaeren, in somewhat pointed contrast to the realism of some of our own patriotic or fashionable poets, even though such expressions as "cabs" and "steamers" are to be found in his work in the original English,depends for its æsthetic value neither on the swing of its slang nor the egregiousness of its expletives. The hot blast of his sincerity sweeps away at once any impeachment of mere dabbling in the ultra-modern. His diction is frequently brusque, and even red, if we may borrow his favourite colour, if not his favourite adjective; yet it never loses the dignity of authentic poetry. For the poet would seem to have been personally susceptible, in the highest degree, to that peculiar multiplication of vitality and intensification of emotion which is the essential effect produced by big metropoles upon certain temperaments. And this cerebral ecstasy is increased by the consciousness of being on the threshold of a new age, "for the ancient dream is dead, and the new one is now being forged." Thus the poet will wander intoThe Cathedrals, take pity on the multitudinous misery of the praying hordes, and boom out again and again the refrain:

"Ô ces foules, ces foulesEt la misère et la détresse qui les foulent."

But note the sociological symbolism of the climax:

"Et les vitraux grands de siècles agenouillésDevant le Christ avec leurs papes immobilesEt leurs martyrs et leurs héros semblent tremblerAu bruit d'un train lointain qui roule sur la ville."

For refusing to bear the cross of Gothic ideas, the poet plunges deliberately into the inferno of modern life. And each fresh circle but kindles his ardour and inflames his Muse. For he will pass with growing exaltation from the muscled teeming life of the port to the garish ballet of a music hall where

"Des bataillons de chair et de cuisses en marcheGrouillent sur des rampes ou sous des arches,Jambes, hanches, gorges, maillots, jupes, dentelles,"

and then, as midnight strikes and the crowd ebbsaway, he will stalk into the "brilliant chemical atmosphere" where

"Au long de promenoirs qui s'ouvrent sur la nuit—Balcons de fleurs, rampes de flammes—Des femmes en deuil de leur âmeEntrecroisent leurs pas sans bruit."

Nor does the poet disdain the grinding factories where

"Entre des murs de fer et pierreSoudainement se lève altièreLa force en rut de la matière,"

or even the Bourse itself, where he sings in feverish staccato rhythm the

"Langues sèches, regards aigus, gestes inverses,Et cervelles qu'en tourbillons les millions traversent."

But it is typical of Verhaeren's essential optimism that after describing with Zolaesque detail both a strike and a "shop of luxury," he should find the ransom of the future in

"La maison de la science au loin dardéeObstinément par à travers les faits jusqu'aux idées."

InLes Heures Claires(1896) the drastic violence ofLes Villes Tentaculairesabates for the time being into a mood of resigned, but yet robust melancholy, which immortalises the sweetness, deepness, and softness of the poet's love for his wife.

InLes Forces Tumultueuses, however, the poet has got once again into the full swing of his drastic stride. The mood is to some extent the same as that ofLes Villes Tentaculaires, though the Zolaesque concreteness of detail is merged in the broadness of a genuine Lucretian sweep. The book consists of a series of lyrical poems, lyrical, albeit, in the sense rather of Pindar than of Herrick, which exalt the variousphases of human energy. Thus in the poem,L'Art,Verhaeren soars upwards with a tremendous rush:

"D'un bondSon pied cassant le sol profondSon double aile dans la lumièreLe cou tendu, le feu sous les paupièresPartit, vers le soleil et vers l'extase,Ce dévoreur d'espace et de splendeur Pégase."

InLes Maîtresthe poet describes the various types of superman, from "the monk" of the Middle Ages to the banker of the twentieth century, who dominates the world as he "binds sinister destiny to his bourgeois will," and sows in the distance his winged gold.

"Son or aile qui s'enivre d'espace,Son or planant, son or rapace,Son or vivant,Son or dont s'éclairent et rayonnent les vents,Son or qui boit la terrePar les pores de son misèreSon or ardent, son or furtif, son or retors.Morceau d'espoir et de soleil—son or!"

Some mention must also be made of the poem,Les Femmes, which, subdivided intoL'Éternelle, L'Amante,L'Amazone, ranks in our view as the greatest sex poem of the century. In contrast, for instance, with Swinburne, who treats sex rather as a thing of beauty and of pleasure than as an underlying world-force, and who has both the advantage and the disadvantage of the specifically classical conception of life, Verhaeren, whether he rings his changes inL'Amanteon the soft refrain, "Mon rêve est embarqué dans une île flottante," shows inL'Amazonethat the New Woman can be something considerably more poetic than a Strindbergian monstrosity, or sings inL'Éternelleher "who thinks she encloses the whole world within her flesh," will boom out again and again the cosmic and universal peal. The verse throughout is as beautiful ascan be desired. But it has something more than beauty; it has stature, majesty, speed, force, that exaltation of reality which is the essence of the highest poetry.

In the poems,La Science,L'Erreur, La Folie,Les Cultes, Verhaeren proceeds to formulate his own philosophy of life, and his prophetic enthusiasm for the new modern truths, under whose clear feet the old texts have crumbled, as he expounds

"Comment la vie est une à travers tous les êtresQu'ils soient matière instruit esprit ou volontéForêt myriadaire et rouge où s'enchevêtrentLes débordements fous de la fécondité."

Put shortly, his philosophy is a compound of those of Nietzsche and of Bergson. His soul, no doubt, swings in unison with the universal rhythm of the world, but, like Nietzsche, he finds in force and life realities transcending all errors, and after a historic survey of the more popular deities of humanity from Gog to Jehovah, and from Satan to Christ, enunciates his belief in humanity in stanzas of sublime blasphemy, far more truly religious than the ambiguous scrolls and rubrics of any antiquarian creed:

"L'homme respire et sur la terre il marche, seul.Il vit pour s'exalter du monde et de lui-même,Sa langue oublie et la prière et le blasphême;Ses pieds foulent le drap de son ancien linceul.Il est l'heureuse audace au lieu d'être la crainte;Tout l'infini ne retentit que de ses bondsVers l'avenir plus doux, plus clair et plus fécondsDont s'aggrave le chant et s'alentit la plainte.Penser, chercher, et découvrir sont ses exploits.Il emplit jusqu'aux bords son existence brêve;Il n'enfle aucun espoir, il ne fausse aucun rêve,Et s'il lui faut des Dieux encore—qu'il les soit!"

InLa Multiple SplendeurandLes Visages de la Viethe same insatiable gusto for an infinitude of life dartsagain and again its red tongue. It is impossible by mere quotation to do justice to the full vastness of Verhaeren's lyric sweep. We would, however, at any rate, refer to the majesty ofLe Mondewith its combined crash and concord of incessant life and the Cyclopean weight of the adamantine line which buttresses at either end the flaming rivers of its verse,

"Le monde est fait avec des astres et des hommes,"

or to the sublimity ofLes Penseursin which the poet tells how

"Autour de la terre obsédéeCircule au fond des nuits, au cœur des joursToujoursL'orage amoncelé des idées,"

and how

"Descartes et Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant et Hegel"

"fixed the highest pinnacles of inaccessible problems for the goal of their silver arrows, and carried within themselves the grand obstinate dream of one day, imprisoning eternity in the white ice of immobile truth."

The very names, too, of some of the poems may possibly reflect some of the facets of their multiplied splendour:Le Verbe, Les Vieux Empires, La Louange du Corps Humain, A la Gloire des Cieux, A la Gloire du Vent, Les Rêves, L'Europe, La Conquête, Les Souffrances, La Joie, La Ferveur, Les Idées, La Vie, L'Effort, L'Action, Plus Loin que les Gares, Le Soir. And again and again rings out in various keys the true Nietzschean note. For "vast hopes come from the unknown" has displaced the ancient balance whereof souls are now tired. But the only reality is life:

"La vie en cris ou en silence,La vie en lutte ou en accordAvec la vie avec la mortLa vie âpre, la vie intense,Elle est ici dans la fureur ou dans la haineDe l'ascendant et rouge ardeur humaine."

It is fine proof also of the vast vitality of Verhaeren that even in so recent a work asLes Rhythmes Souverainesthe muscled majesty of his verse, though possibly a trifle less violent, shows no abatement of its essential strength. We would mention in particular the poemsMichel Ange, Chant d'Hercule, Les Barbareswith the swift crispness of its one-foot lines, and above allLe Paradiswith its almost Miltonic picture of

"L'archange endormant Ève au creux de sa grande aile."

But does not Verhaeren transcend Milton in the wideness of his humanity when he describes not with regret but with the maximum of exalted exultation how

"Ève bondit soudain hors de son aile immense,Oh l'heureuse subite et féconde démence,Que l'ange avec son cœur trop pur ne comprit pas."

In his latest volume,Les Blés Mouvants, Verhaeren sinks back no doubt to a quieter and serener mood, but who shall say that these eclogues do not simply represent the sage crouch for another leonine spring?

We do not propose to make more than a passing reference to Verhaeren's plays, for it is the lyric rather than the drama which is his true medium of expression.

Hélène de Sparte, with all its graceful Alexandrines, is inferior to any play by D'Annunzio, and even the socialist dramaLes Aubesis, notwithstanding the fine verses with which it is sown, simply stiff and heavy when compared with Hauptmann'sWeavers. It is by his lyrics that Verhaeren lives, and will continue to live beyond his mere death whenever it comes, as the greatest and most essentially European poet ofour new age. For his lyrics are equally great, both in their message and the method of their expression. Disdaining alike the cowardice and the perversity of those who, refusing to face the red realities of the present century, fly for their comfort to the pale shadows of the Middle Ages, Verhaeren has plunged boldly into the very brazier of our modern existence. He affirms, he combats, he prophesies, but he rarely, if ever, rests. He hymns every phase of life, from the human brain to the human body, and from the winds and seas of nature to the towns and marts of man. And no message is more virile, more tonic, more essentially healthy, for is not his message the phœnix of a new humanitarian faith soaring aloft on its fiery wings out of the corpses of the decomposing dogmas? And his prosody has the supreme excellence that it is not a mere æsthetic end in itself, but a drastic instrument of expression. Your pure æsthete, no doubt, may cavil at his ruggedness. For he is the Rodin of poetical rhyme, the veritable Vulcan of verse, or rather a Siegfried forging the sword of the future on the anvil of the present, as he drives in the stubborn nails of his nouns with the hissing hammers of his adjectives. His lines no doubt at times will growl, grind and boom, hit the reader in the face with all the force of a clenched fist, and palpitate with a full-bloodedness somewhat overpowering for the jaded and the anæmic. But is not this the very seal of success in a man who specifically sets himself to sing not the mere beauty of beauty, but the beauty of force, the beauty of life, "life violent, prodigious, unsatiated, the universal spasm of all things"?

"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 feuD'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 thedoyensof 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 andtours de forceof 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 ofthe 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 theRisorgimento 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 profitablydeveloped 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 abonâ fidedesire 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 theFremdenindustrieafter 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 deliberateriposte, 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 theFuturists 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.

Yet, taking the matter in its broad lines, M. Marinetti's programme for "the indefinite physiological and intellectual progress of man" expresses admirably the whole theory of the Nietzschean Superman. Nietzschean also are such phrases as, "the type inhuman, mechanical, cruel, omniscient and combative," or "the multiplied man who mingles with iron, nourishes himself on electricity, and only appreciates the delight of the danger and of the heroism of every single day." The real distinction lies in the fact that the Futurist Superman is more practical, more concrete, more up-to-date, and, above all, infinitely less dreamy than his elder and more pedantic brother.

And in spite of M. Marinetti's analysis of Nietzscheanism as nothing but the artificial resurrection of a dead and past antiquity, the two ideals are harmonious in their denunciation of the facile and automatic reverence for "the good old days," and their savage exhortation to "sweep away the grey cinders of the Past with the incandescent lava of the Future."

This announcement of a virile desire to improve and improve and improve, not only on the past but also on the present, constitutes the principal mark in the Futurist platform. Hence the leaders of the movement have coined the two wordspasséisme, the object of their onslaught, andFuturism, the watch-wordof their faith. And truculently pushing their theories to the extreme limit of extravagant logic, M. Marinetti and his brothers in arms exhorted the assembled Venetians, in the 200,000 multicoloured manifestos which on a certain memorable day they flung down into the Piazza San Marco, "to cure and cicatrize this rotting town, magnificent wound of the Past, and to hasten to fill its small fœtid canals with the ruins of its tumbling, leprous palaces." But the remedy is constructive as well as destructive.

"Burn the gondolas, those swings for fools, and erect up to the sky the rigid geometry of large metallic bridges and factories with waving hair of smoke; abolish everywhere the languishing curve of the old architecture."

We see at once how, in this more than Wellsian enthusiasm for all the romantic possibilities of a scientific civilisation, they declare the most sanguinary warà l'outrancewith that Ruskinian and Pre-Raphaelite sentimentalism which, sublimely burying its mediæval head in the immemorial sands of a crumbling past, is somewhat ill-adapted to confront the onrushing simoon of an increasingly definite and formidable future. And with the deliberate object of emphasizing his point with the maximum of provocative aggressiveness, the Futurist will fling at his enemies the insolent paradox that a motor-car in motion has a higher æsthetic value than the Victory of Samothrace, or announce with theatrical solemnity that the pain of a man is just about as interesting in their eyes as the pain of an electric lamp, suffering in convulsive spasms and crying out with the most agonising effects of colour.

Yet if we strip this new "beauty of mechanism" and "æsthetic of speed" of its loud garb of ostentatious extravagance, the intrinsic theories themselves strikeus as neither monstrous nor unreasonable. For if we may presume to put our own unauthorised gloss on M. Marinetti's vividly illuminated manuscript, what the Futurist really wishes is to break down the conventional divorce that is so often thought to exist between ideal Art and actual Life, so as to bring the two elements into the most drastic and immediate contact. Art, in fact, should not be an escapefrombut an exaltationofthe red impetus of life. Art's function is not merely to titillate the dispassionate æsthetic feeling of the dilettante or connoisseur, but to thrill with a keen vital emotion the actual experiencer of life. Form is not an end in itself, its sole function is to extract the whole emotional quality of its content. And when confronted with the problem of what content is best fitted to be the proper subject of artistic representation, your Futurist would promptly retort that, inasmuch as the tumultuous twentieth-century emotions of "steel, pride, fever, and speed" are those to which the twentieth-century civilisation will naturally vibrate with the most authentic sympathy, those emotions and those alone are the proper subject-matter for twentieth-century art.

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 hisKrieg, 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 inventeda 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 itsrigolomusic, and all the hustling clash and clatter of its insolent carouse.—

It is also significant of their generalWeltanschauungthat 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 theMorning Postcorrespondent 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 reviewPoesia. 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 wordFuturism, 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 theFigaroin 1909, M. Marinetti has devotedhimself 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 finebravuratake 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 ifpasséeobject 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 thePalais Nomadesof 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 theConquête des Étoilesthe twenty-four-year-oldMarinetti, 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 thoughintoxicated 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 caracolantede sables soulevés tout ruisselants de feu;c'est ainsi que le Simoun galopesur l'océan figé des sables,en balangant son torse géant d'idole barbaresur des fuyantes croupes d'onagres affolés."

In the series of poems, however, known asDestruction,

"Since there is only splendour in this word of terrorAnd 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 saisde par le jurement de tes lèvres, écumantesde par ton jurement que répercutent de plage en plageles 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'oubliC'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'ombretout 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'aveuglesqui vont ramant par les couloirs d'un labyrinthe!Vos baisers out toujours l'acharnement infatigabled'un dialogue enragé entre deux sourdsemprisonnés 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 entitledLe 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 "Hinduevenings," "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 ofDestruction,we would say that releasing poetry from the shackles of the conventional subject-matter, the conventional language, and the conventional metres to which ithad 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, alreadyWith 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 ofLa 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 ofDestructionis 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 horizonsengloutisseurs," or "jusqu'au volant trapeze de ce grand vent gymnaste."

Or take the following passage fromThe 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 tiennentempoignées violemment, comme on tientune 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 sonoreset des renaclements."

More aery and fantastic in their radiance are theLittle Dramas of Light, which in the same volume play outside the walls ofLa 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 moretumultuous life than is afforded by the "ventriloquist soliloquies of the gurgling waters of the quays."

"C'est ainsi, c'est ainsi que les jeunes Naviresimplorent 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 raidissenttels des nerfs trop tendus qui grincent de désir,car ils veulent partir et s'en allervers la tristesse affreuse (qu'importe?) inconsolableet (qu'importe?) infinied'avoir tout savouré et tout maudit (qu'importe?)."

We can perhaps best formulate the dynamicélan 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 publishedLe 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 thebelles lettresofLes 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 publishedFuturisme(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 milliersde 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 ofMafarka 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 thereligion 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, entitledThe 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 ofLes Moucherons Politiciens, now assisting at the tumultuous congress ofLes 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 theBattle of Monfalconeis in our view superior to any of the military verse even of Kipling himself.The Pope's Monoplaneis, 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.

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