Chapter VIII: Part 8

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of this "Rising City" of Futurism, as it rears with such vehement exaltation from out the trampled debris of a superseded and dishonoured past.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

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 words _passéisme_, the object of their onslaught, and _Futurism_, the watch-word of 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 war _à l'outrance_ with 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 strike us 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 escape _from_ but an exaltation _of_ the 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 his _Krieg_, 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 invented a 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 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,

"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 though intoxicated 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 caracolante
de sables soulevés tout ruisselants de feu;
c'est ainsi que le Simoun galope
sur l'océan figé des sables,
en balangant son torse géant d'idole barbare
sur des fuyantes croupes d'onagres affolés."

In the series of poems, however, known as _Destruction_,

"Since there is only splendour in this word of terror
And 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 sais
de par le jurement de tes lèvres, écumantes
de par ton jurement que répercutent de plage en plage
les 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'oubli
C'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'ombre
tout 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'aveugles
qui vont ramant par les couloirs d'un labyrinthe!
Vos baisers out toujours l'acharnement infatigable
d'un dialogue enragé entre deux sourds
emprisonnés 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 entitled _Le 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 "Hindu evenings," "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 of _Destruction,_ we would say that releasing poetry from the shackles of the conventional subject-matter, the conventional language, and the conventional metres to which it had 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, already
With 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 of _La 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 of _Destruction_ is 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 horizons engloutisseurs," or "jusqu'au volant trapeze de ce grand vent gymnaste."

Or take the following passage from _The 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 tiennent
empoignées violemment, comme on tient
une 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 sonores
et des renaclements."

More aery and fantastic in their radiance are the _Little Dramas of Light_, which in the same volume play outside the walls of _La 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 more tumultuous life than is afforded by the "ventriloquist soliloquies of the gurgling waters of the quays."

"C'est ainsi, c'est ainsi que les jeunes Navires
implorent 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 raidissent
tels des nerfs trop tendus qui grincent de désir,
car ils veulent partir et s'en aller
vers la tristesse affreuse (qu'importe?) inconsolable
et (qu'importe?) infinie
d'avoir tout savouré et tout maudit (qu'importe?)."

We can perhaps best formulate the dynamic _élan 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 published _Le 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 the _belles lettres_ of _Les 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 published _Futurisme_ (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
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,

"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 of _Les Moucherons Politiciens_, now assisting at the tumultuous congress of _Les 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 the _Battle of Monfalcone_ is in our view superior to any of the military verse even of Kipling himself. _The Pope's Monoplane_ is, 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.

THE VOLCANO

Ne'er have I slept; I labour endlessly,
Enriching space with many a masterpiece
That lives and dies in a day.
Over the baking of the chiselled rocks
Upon the vitrefaction of the many-coloured sands
I keep my watch
So well that the clay 'neath my fingers
Will metamorphose
To a porcelain of perfect rose,
Which I shatter with the buffets of my steam.

My accomplice is the Strait of Messina
Which dozes in the dawn, couching white and glossy
As an Angora cat...
My accomplice is the Strait of Messina
Lolling like a cushion of lazy turquoise silk,
With soft Arabian words embroidered by the wake
Of clouds and languorous sails,
Words woven silently methinks
With a fair silver thread upon the ocean's robe.

The perfidious moon is my accomplice,
The arch-courtesan of the painted stars,
For nowhere are the moon's cajoleries
So luring and persuasive.

And nowhere does the moon cast such assiduous eyes
To seduce the hard red funnels of the steamers,
Those surly strollers South
With a fat cigar in their mouth
Whose smoke they spit against the azure sky.

And nowhere does the moon throw such a tender shower
Of soft and violet ashes,
As that which lulls to sleep the lava petrified
On the black houses hanging on my flanks.
And nowhere has the moon such poignancy
Of inundations of light and ecstasy,
As on the gashed paths
Carved by my surgical fire.

But woe to those who follow the bleating light of the moon,
And the plaintive bells of the flocks,
And the bitter flutes of the shepherds whose world-weary notes
Are long, long threads that vanish in the blue!
Woe to those who refuse to make their galloping blood
Keep step with the gallop of the blood of my devastation!

And woe to those who wish to root their heads,
To root their feet and houses
In a craven hope of eternity!
A truce to building, for ye must encamp!
Nay, am I not shaped even as a tent
Whose truncated top fanneth my wrath?
I only love the acrobatic stars
Who balance on the rolling balls of smoke
Wherewith I juggle!

MYSELF
I can dance to them, and juggle in mid air,
And shower my song on the reverberations
Of thy storms that breed
In subterranean depths!...
And I descend
To hear the diapasons of thy voice.
So make a pause
In the electrical discharges of thy tubes
That tear from thy base the underlying rocks.
Enjoin to silence all thy babbling grottoes,
That all a-flutter quiver ceaselessly.
Gag with thick cinders
The basaltic echoes whose chorus rings thy praise.

What good are thy volcanic bombs
That serve as punctuations for the growlings of thy speech?
And what care I for the ruddy jets
Of thine aggressive foam?
Thy deluges of mud have soiled my wings of white,
But check me not, for proof against thine avalanche
Of scoria I descend, gilded and aureoled
By all the powdery shower of thy dumbfounded gold.

It is also relevant to mention that M. Marinetti has been recently formulating new rules and principles for his new literary code. Among the more drastic phases of this stylistic revolution we would mention the employment of mathematical signs and symbols, the rebellion from too rigid and pedantic a syntax, the minimum use of the adjective and the infinitive, the opening up of new fields of images and metaphors, and the freer and more increased use of onomatopœia. These ideas are succinctly, though no doubt extravagantly, set out in the two manifestos entitled _Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty_ and _The Futurist Anti-Tradition_.

Space vetoes more than the enumeration of the other Futurist poets--Luccini, Palazzescho, Folgore, and Altomare--though we may perhaps mention the recently published _Poesie Electrichie_ of Govoni, and the _A Claude Debussy_ of Paolo Buzzi, which won the first prize of the first international competition of "Poesia," and which transfers into a marvellously fluid Italian verse the at once ethereal and faunish emotions of the composer's music.

But if, finally, we may speculate on the Future of Futurism, its real prospects and its real significance are to be found in the fact that, though extravagant and aggressive, it is in essence a concentrated manifestation of the whole vital impetus of the twentieth century. Its relationship to Nietzscheanism we have already examined. Almost equally close is its affinity to the standpoints of such representative spirits of the real genius of this particular age as Verhaeren and Mr. Wells; Verhaeren, the gazer on the _Multiple Splendour_ of the _Tumultuous Forces_ of the _Visages of Life_, with his motto, "Life is to be mounted and not to be descended; the whole of life is in the soaring upwards," who expresses in the strenuous majesty of his verse the whole raging complex of our psychological and material civilisation; Mr. Wells, too, the glorifier of all the new machinery of our scientific fabric; Mr. Wells, who, with all his intoxication for the "gigantic syntheses of life," expresses himself most effectually by the maxim, "The world exists for and by initiative, and the method of initiative is individuality."

Even if we go to more concrete and more topical manifestations, there is not wanting evidence that the fiery blast of the Futurists is fanned by the huge bellows of our own labouring _Zeitgeist_.

If indeed we may meddle with the very latest metaphysical terminology, we would suggest that it is by a singularly brilliant and apposite stroke of intuition on the part of, the newly discovered _élan de vie_ that, at a time which is moving at an unprecedented rapidity, at a time when the two great brother nations of the Teutonic race are preparing their rival sacrifices for the God of War with all the mocking and drastic fraternity of a Cain and of an Abel; when the air is thick with the wings of a new and regenerated France; when the militant mænads of both the West and the East, under the inspiration of their dashing and elusive Pythoness, are waging with foaming fanaticism a Holy War of Sex; when even one of the most responsible of our lawyers is coquetting dangerously with both the theory and the practice of the superior ethical value of Active Resistance; when the most venerable of our Lord Justices recently interpolated a homily on the Law of Change into the middle of an otherwise purely legal judgment; when the two young, but patriotic _condottieri_ of either political party are fast leaping into a more and more aggressive prominence; when the insurgent masses of our industrial proletariat have made a vehement and not entirely unsuccessful charge against existing economic fabric of the country; when Mr. Thomas Hardy has attended, in the pages of even the _Fortnightly Review_, the funeral of the old God of pity, and when Bergsonism, judiciously advertised in the masquerade of a religious revival, has replaced the old Eternal Absolute with the creative activity of an endless Movement, the Futurists should now exalt the sublime vehemence of war, and the aggressive fury of youth, while M. Marinetti chants the strident hallelujahs of the new God of sweat and agony and tension, and Signor Russolo and his _confrères_ exhibit to us in the actual canvases of the Sackville Galleries the rampant hordes of rebellion and the painting of Movement itself.

INDEX

Abel, 237
_Advent_, 110
Æschylus (_cf_. Corelli), 115
Alcibiades, 61
_Almansor_, 32
_Alroy_, 55
Altomare, 236
_Amour, De l'_, 13, 14
_Anatol_, 161, 176-9
_Anne Veronica_, 120
Anti-Semite, 115, 190
Anti-Semitism, 115
Antoine, 98
_Aphrodite_, 129
_Arabian Nights_, 144
_Ardath_, 114, 115
Aristotle, 74
_Armance_, 15-16
Athanasius, 89
Attila, 117
_Aubes, Les_, 210
Austria, 215
_Awkward Age, The_, 153

BALFOUR, Mr., 123
Balzac, 38, 201
_Banti, Consultation de_, 9
Barker, 162
Barrie, J. M., 132
_Baths of Lucca_, 35
Baudelaire, 121, 144, 154
Beaconsfield. _See_ Disraeli
Beardsley, 144
Belgium, 197
Bergson, 208
Bergsonism, 238
Berlioz, 38, 44
Beyle. _See_ Stendhal
_Beyond the Rocks_, 128
Bible, 89, 120
Bigillon, 5
Birrell, 64
Björnsen, 98
_Black Flags_, 95, 100, 111-13
Blake, 219
Blatchford, Robert, 132
_Blés Mouvants, Les_, 210
Bohair, 38
_Bond, The_, 104
_Book of Songs_, 30, 31, 35, 36, 49
Borgia, 86
Borne, 38, 39
Bottomley, Horatio, 119
Bourget, 24
_Bovary, Madame_, 16
_Boy_, 115
Brandes, 71
Brieux, 188
Browning, 63
Brummel, 61
Bryce, 60
_Büchse von Pandora_, 138, 145, 149, 150, 155
Buddhism, 72
Burne-Jones, 219
Buzzi, 236
Byron, 30, 52, 93

CAIN, 81, 237
_Call of Life_, 175-6
_Campagnes Hallucinés_, 202-4
Carlyle, 44, 66
Carpani, 11
Casanova, 64
Catholicism, 39, 110
Cervantes, 30
Chant, Mrs. Ormiston, 133
_Chartreuse de Parme_, 20, 21
Chateaubriand, 6
Chauvinism, 215
Chesterton, G. K., 119, 198
Christ, 71, 110, 118, 208
_Childe Harold_, 52
Christianity, 71, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80, 88, 93;
Electric Principle of, 114
_Comédie Humaine_, 16
_Confession of a Fool_, 95, 97, 105-8
Congreve, 187
_Conquête des Étoiles_, 223-5
_Conrad_, 52
Conservatism, 67
_Contarini Fleming_, 55, 62
Corelli, Miss Marie, 114-33
_Countess Mizzi_, 161, 184
Court Theatre, 139
Craigie, Mrs., 69
_Creditor, The_, 103
Crispi, 230
Crowley, Aleister, 114
_Crown Bride_, ill

_Damascus, To_, 110
_Dämmerseelen_, 191
D'Annunzio, 210, 214, 231
Daru, 3, 4, 9, 12, 18
Darwin, 84, 136
_Death Dance_, 97, 110-11
_Débâcles, Les_, 199
Debussy, 219
Dembowska, Countess, 12
Democracy, 67
_Démon de la Vitesse_, 212, 226
_De Profundis_, 140
_Destruction_, 223, 225
_Deutschland_, 40
Disraeli, 50-69
Disraeli, Mrs., 62, 63, 68
Don Juan, 19, 50, 97, 215
_Dorian Gray_, 132
D'Orsay, 61
Dowie, Dr., 117
_Dream Pictures_, 30, 32
Drury Lane, 122
Dugazon, 7
Dumas, 38

_Easter_, 110
_Ehre, Die_, 136
_Einsame Weg, Der_, 171, 172
Eldon, 67
_Elizabeth's Visits to America_, 128
_Embarrassments_, 177
_Endymion_, 52
_Erdgeist_, 134, 135, 145-9
Essen, Siri von, 95
_Esther Waters_, 129
Eugenics, 154

FAGUET, 24
Fakredeen, 52
_Father, The_, 101, 102
Faust, 158
Ferri, 230
_Feuerwerk_, 154
Fichte, 74

_Flamands, Les_, 198, 199
_Flambeaux Noirs_, 199-202
_Fleurs du Mal_, 121
Foote, G. W., 119
_Forces Tumultueuses_, 196
_Foundations of Belief_, 123
France, 214, 237
_Franziska_, 155, 157-9
_Frau Margit_, 95
Free Love, 139, 154
_Free Opinions_, 119
Free Verse, 223
_Freiwild_, 173-5
Froude, 51
_Frühlingserwachen_, 135, 145, 150-3, 159
Futurism, 212-38

GALSWORTHY, 157, 159, 162, 163
Gambetta, 67
Garvice, Charles, 116
Gautier, 38
_Geheimniss der Gilde_, 95
_Genealogy of Morals_, 70-90
Genesis, 119
Germany, 72, 135-9
Gladstone, 53, 54, 61, 65, 66, 68
_Gluckspeter_, 95
Glyn, Elinor, 126-30
_God's Good Man_, 122
Goethe, 74, 144
Gog, 208
Govoni, 236
_Green Cockatoo_, 161, 182-3
Guilbert, Mélanie, 7
Gull, Ranger, 115

HALEVY, Jehudah, 43
_Hallucinated Country-sides_, 202-4
_Hannele_, 137
Hardy, 238
Hart, Julius, 137
_Harzreise_, 34
Hauptmann, 137, 210
_Haydn and Mozart, Lives of_, 11
_Heimkehr_, 34
Heine, 26-49, 60, 77, 89
Heine, Amalie, 31, 32
Heine, Samson, 29
Heine, Solomon, 30
_Hélène de Sparte_, 210
Heliogabalus, 121
Hermant, Abel, 122
_Hidalla_, 154
Higher Criticism (Corelli), 119
_His Hour_, 128
_History of Painting in Italy_, 12
Hitchman, 50
Hobbes, 83
Hofmann, 28
Hogarth, 150
Holy Alliance, 27
_Holy Orders_, 121
Hugo, 38, 224
Humboldt, 38

IBSEN, 153
Idealists, 87
Ihering, 85
_In Allen Satteln Gerecht_, 156
_In Allen Wassern Gewaschen_, 156
_Inferno_, 109
Ingersoll, 119
_Intoxication_, 110
Isaiah, 72, 133
Israel, 71, 78
_Italian Travels_, 11
_Italy_, 35, 213

JACK the Ripper, 149
James, Henry, 137, 153, 177, 187
Jeremiah, 72
Jesuits, 118
Jesus, 71, 72
Jew-Millionaires, 121
Jews, 118
Jezebels, Upper-Ten, 121, 127
Job, 111
_Johannes_, 137
Josepha, 30
_Journal, Le_, 24
Judæa, 78
_Julien_, 17-20
_Junge Leiden_, 35
Juvenal, 133

KABLY, Mdlle., 3
Kahn, Gustave, 223
_Kammersänger, Der_, 140-142
Kant, 40, 87
Karl Moor, 19
Key, Ellen, 88, 96
Kipling, 110, 234
Klinger, 219

LAFAYETTE, 38
_Lamiel_, 22-23
_Lebendige Stunden_, 177, 180-182
_Legends_, 109
_Les Dieux s'en vont D'Annunzio reste_, 230
Lesbos, 131
_Liebelei_, 164-166, 169
_Liebestrank, Der_, 153
Life Force, 145
"Little Mary," 132
Longfellow, 153
Louason, 7, 8
Louis XVI, 2
Louis Philippe, 21
Louÿs, 115, 129
Loyola, 117
Luccini, 236
_Lucien Leuwen_, 21-22
_Lyrisches Intermezzo_, 32, 35, 36

MADONNA, 96, 97
Maeterlinck, 197, 230
_Mafarka le Futuriste_, 129, 231, 232
Maine, 81, 84
_Märchen, Das_, 167, 168
Marinetti, 129, 212-238
_Marionetten_, 177, 179
_Marius the Epicurean_, 124
_Marquis von Keith_, 153
_Marriage_, 98-100
_Masken und Wunder_, 191
_Mate, The_, 183
Maupassant, 98, 191
Maupin, Mademoiselle de, 157
Meade, L. T., 116
_Medardus, Der Junge_, 184-186
Meissner, 38
_Meister Olof_, 94
_Meister, Wilhelm_, 55
Melville, Walter, 115
_Mighty Atom, The_, 115
Milan, 4, 12, 13, 213
Milton, 210
_Minnehaha_, 153
Mirbeau, Octave, 122
Mirat, Matilde, 41
_Miss Julie_, 102, 103
_Mit Allen Hünden Gehetzt_, 156
_Moines, Les_, 199
Molière, 3, 121
_Monna Vanna_, 140
Moore, George, 106
_Motherly Love_, 104
Mouche, La, 48
_Multiple Splendeur, Le_, 208-209
_Murder of Delicia_, 115
_Musik_, 155, 156, 157

NAPOLEON, 29, 30, 69
Nerval, Gérard de, 38
New England, 67, 153
_New Machiavelli_, 105, 120
New Woman Movement, 96
Nietzsche, 24, 70-90, 136, 144, 208, 216
Nirvana, 73
Nonconformity, 119
_Nordsee Cyklus_, 33, 34
Northcliffe, 86
_Nouvelle Héloïse_, 3

_Oaha_, 154
O'Connell, 57
O'Connor, T. P., 50
_Open Sea, The_, 100, 108
Opportunism, 67
Orestes, 81
Ovid, 144

PALAZZESCHO, 236
Papacy, 213
Peel, 64
Péladan, 131
Pietragrua, Countess, 4, 10, 12
Pinero, 145
_Plain Dealer, The_, 141
_Playing with Fire_, 97, 104-105
Poe, 154
_Poesia_, 221, 236
_Poetische Nachlese_, 35, 47
_Pope's Monoplane, The_, 233-236
_Professor Bernhardi_, 188-190
Przybyszewski, 109
_Puppet-player_, 179-180

QUEUX, Le, 116

_Racine and Shakespeare_, 14, 15
_Ratcliff_, 32
_Raymond, Jack_, 119
Realism, 138
_Red Room_, 95
_Reigen_, 179
_Reisebilder_, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 49
René, 19
Restoration, French, 17
Revolution, French, 27, 28, 53
_Revolutionary Epicke_, 67
_Rhythmes Souveraines, Les_, 210
Richter, 38
_Risorgimento Italiano_, 213
_Road to the Open, The_, 192-194
Robespierre, 40
Rockefeller, 86
Rodenbach, 197,
Rodin, 211
_Romance of Two Worlds_, 114
_Romantic School, The_, 40
Romanticism, 14, 27, 28, 138
_Romanzero_, 35, 47, 48
Rome, 79, 213
_Rome, Naples, and Florence_, 11
Roosevelt, President, 116
Rossetti, 219
_Rossini, Life of_, 15
_Rouge et le Noir, Le_, 9, 16, 17-20, 56, 185
Rousseau, 46, 83
Rubens, 197
Russolo, 220, 238

_Salome_, 140
Sand, 38
Sappho, 131
Satan, 208
_Satan, Sorrows of_, 114
Schiller, 144
Schlegel, 38
_Schloss von Wetterstein_, 155, 156
Schnitzler, 161-195
Schopenhauer, 72, 73, 74, 144
Secessionists, 140
Secessionsbühne, 137
Sefchen, 30
Selden, Camille, 48
Self-and-Sex Series, 130
Semites, 125
_Serialese, Manual of_, 133
Severini, 220
Shaw, G. B., 126, 135, 155, 159, 162, 163
Sichel, 51
Sidonia, 52
Smiles, Samuel, 115
Smith, Adam, 7
Socialists, 88
Sorel, Julien, 16-20
_Souvenirs d'Egotisme_, 24
Spencer, 77
_Spring's Awakening_, 115. See
_Frühlingserwachen_
St. Amand, 197
St. Barbe, 197
St. Beuve, 24
Staël, Mme. de, 40
Stage Society, 139, 161, 162
Stendhal, 1-25, 74, 185
Sterne, 30
Stratford-on-Avon, 131
Strauss, 219
_Strife_, 163
Strindberg, 91-113
Stuck, 219
Sudermann, 88, 137
Suffragette, 96
Superman, 75, 80 85, 87, 136, 163
Sutro, 162
Swan, Annie, 116
_Swan White_, 111
Sweden, 96
Swedenborgianism, 110
_Swedish Destinies_, 98
_Swedish Miniatures_, 111
Swift, 30, 44
_Swiss Tales_, 100
Switzerland, 215
Symbolists, 224

TAINE, 20, 24, 136
Tamerlane, 86
_Tancred_, 55, 60, 65
Tanner, John, 97
_Tartuffe_, 121
Technique, 163
_Temporal Power_, 120, 124
Tenatri, 230

_Tentacular Towns_, 202-205
_Terminations_, 177
_Thelma_, 119, 124
Thorne, Guy, 115
_Three Weeks_, 127, 130
Thucydides, 132
Tolstoi, 76, 126
Tories, 65, 66, 67
Torquemada, 117
_Totentanz_, 126, 135, 142-4
Tracy, 7
_Turn of the Screw_, 137

UHL, Frida, 109
Ultramontanes, 21
Ultramontanism, 115