The Impulse to Futurism

I

THINK what it means to be born, like Marinetti, in Egypt, to have a lawyer as one’s father, to be taught at a Jesuit College, and to be an Italian!

To be born in the tomb of the world, the habitat of mummies, the ash-pit of seven thousand years, the home of unchanging arts which took twenty dynasties to die, the temple where the worshiped cat had, not nine lives, but nine times nine hundred!

To be surrounded from childhood by the law—that codification of custom, that consecration of precedent, the dead hand of the obsolete, the fetter upon change, the executioner of hope!

To spend youth in a Jesuit College — to live always in church — in a Church eternal and immutable! To be told that the highest wisdom lies behind us; to derive knowledge from ‘the Fathers’; to regard criticism, interpretation, and innovation as mortal sins; to contemplate an unchanging eternity behind and before; to repeat with profound reverence several times in a day, ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end! ’

And then to be an Italian and live in Italy; to listen morning, noon, and night to the lamentations of that weeping Niobe; to inhabit a museum haunted by tourists, antiquaries, and guides; to be disregarded by thousands and thousands of German and English visitors as something out of place and insignificant — something that hardly exists — just because you are alive, because you are not a genuine antique, but an imitation, a forgery, a modern copy of old times! To be faced at every corner by some ancient master of poetry, of eloquence, of painting, sculpture, or architecture, who once reached perfection, and whom everyone is still taught to imitate, but whom no one can ever surpass! To be the son of a country ‘with a past’ — a country which, instead of decently covering up her past, lives upon its scrappy keepsakes and memorials, exposes them to public view, and rejoices, as over a lucrative investment, when any old relic is raked from oblivion!

To be suckled by mummies, swaddled by the Law and the Church, reach manhood in a museum, a picture-gallery, a resort of tourists on the lookout for antiquities — that was Marinetti’s fate. Here was a man of passionate southern nature, alert, self-assertive, as choke-full of vitality as a shell of Lyddite, and such was his fate. No wonder he rebelled. No wonder his first thought was to defy precedent, to shatter tradition, to explode antiquity; and his second thought to demand life, and explore new paths for its expression. No wonder he is a Futurist.

We, too, in England are nursed on mummies and trammeled by the past. Our schooldays are governed by a rigid tradition of ‘good form.’ Our law courts are governed by the belief that legal decisions upon questions of good and evil are binding for ever; that what has been done once should always be done again; that a statute ordained by Edward III to control the vagabonds, ‘pillors and barrators’ of his French Wars should naturally be used to control a Suffragette speaking in Trafalgar Square. We also, like the City Fathers at their banquets, broaden slowly down from precedent to precedent, and the broadening of City Fathers is rapid compared with our freedom’s.

Till quite lately, nearly all of us were educated on an ancient collection of writings or traditions, solemnly believed to contain the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. To criticize or question was impious; even to suggest that the strength of the Bible lay in its beauty and religious morality rather than in its historical accuracy, was a blasphemous presumption. And though that time has now gone by, the habit of all our churches keeps our eyes fixed steadily on the past. We are taught that the highest revelation of divine wisdom — indeed, its only revelation — lies two thousand years behind us. That the age of sanctity is passed. That the best we can do is to imitate the examples of apostles, disciples, and long-departed saints. That the present world is rolling further and further away from the highest ideal of holiness.

For arts and literature, we also are brought up, like Marinetti, in a museum, although the English museum is neither so beautiful nor so stupefying as the Italian. For architecture, the greatest of all arts, we are instructed to study and imitate the remaining specimens of Greek, Byzantine, Mediæval, and Renaissance building; to select one of these styles and copy it as closely as we can; or, if we must be original, to take two or three of these styles and mix them up adroitly. The result of our imitation and combination is the British Museum, the Houses of Parliament, the War Office, and the National Liberal Club — fit homes for the mouldering antiquities there enshrined, but in themselves destitute of vitality, creative invention, or the spark of living genius.

So in the subordinate arts, such as painting, sculpture, and handicrafts, we have been commanded either to go on imitating the Greeks, with the results we see in the still-born little pictures of Leighton and Alma Tadema, or in the Victoria Memorial, where that worthy woman sits, clothed and in her right mind, amid corybantic groups of naked men and women, pagan deities of dubious morality, and nymphs who would never have been admitted to her Court in their present costume; or else we have been commanded to imitate the blessed ages of romantic mystery and touching faith, when happy craftsmen chipped and chaffered in the cheaping-steads, knights quested for distressed damsels in haunted forests, and John Ball founded the Fabian Society. Under these behests we have worshiped Burne-Jones and his yearning dreams; we have stocked our minds and homes with mediæval trumpery; we have constructed battlements to our seats of learning, towered walls for our peaceful streets, angled houses for our rotund persons, ingle-nooks, beams industriously marked with the adze, maypoles, Morris-dances, and all the other artful-and-crafty contraptions of modern Oxford and the Garden Suburbs.

Or take literature. If the greatness of her old masters in the arts has converted Italy into a museum for tourists, the greatness of our old writers oppresses England in like manner. In literature we stand very high. We contend with France for the second place to Greece. But what a price we pay for our fame! How it overwhelms and depresses us, turning our eyes always backward, binding us to old models, blinding us to the changeful splendors of to-day, hampering us with suffocating loads of commentaries, biographies, variorum editions, learned societies, revivals, pilgrimages, and the American tourists to Stratford! Shakespeare has done us incalculable harm. But for him we should have had no dissertations on the character of Hamlet, no interminable dissensions on the meaning of the sonnets, no bloodthirsty controversies over the color of Mary Fitton’s hair (which probably changed like the chameleon), no opportunity for leisured lunatics to waste time in discovering Baconian cryptograms, instead of employing it on ravings in Bedlam. But for Shakespeare we should not now be struggling to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds for a Memorial Theatre, that will lie heavy on our hands, no matter how empty. But for him we might now be enjoying a fresh and vital drama, and we should not have had to wait three centuries for a Norwegian to show us an escape from boredom. But for him and Milton, we might never have heard blank verse, either in verse or prose.

What is true of Shakespeare is true of others in less degree. Think of the imitators of Pope, of Wordsworth, of Dickens and George Meredith. In England our youth has long ceased to imitate Byron. We are too comfortable even to copy that noble spirit. But in Austria I noticed the other day that youth was wearing the Byronic collar, without the Byronic gloom. And among ourselves, look at the delightful young men growing more and more like Shelley every shining hour! Because of the very greatness of our literature, almost equal in greatness to the sculpture of Greece and the painting of Italy, we have fallen under the curse of immortality.

Egypt also was once a great country, but for thousands of years it lay dying of immortality. Once it had a gleam of hope, a possibility of change. It was visited by ten plagues. But no frogs or lice or flies or locusts or murrain or living darkness — not even the death of all the first-born (those natural propagators of tradition), could eradicate the pestilent germ of the greatest plague of all — the plague of immortality. We remember those Struldbrugs whom Gulliver discovered in the kingdom of Laputa. Doomed to immortality, they were peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, incapable of friendship, dead to all natural affections. Such is the curse which immortality brings. ‘Immortality is a crime,’ the Futurists proclaim. It is worse than a crime. It is a nuisance.

As an illustration, let me quote from a Futurist painter whose words I am bound to listen to with respect. I mean my son. Speaking as a painter in the Doré Gallery’s Futurist Exhibition in June, 1914, Mr. Richard Nevinson said,

‘No one could live with a singer incessantly and constantly singing in a room. So it is impossible to live with a picture. This applies to all pictures, past, present, and future. Why is it that no one would take the Mona Lisa as a gift? It is n’t a very bad picture. It is simply because we cannot walk or go anywhere in Europe without getting a reproduction of her smile, which by its very monotony becomes that of a grinning imbecile.’

Alas for immortality that has become a nuisance and a bore! Alas, and yet again, alas!

II

I am not immortal. My smile will never be reduced to the grinning of an imbecile by monotonous repetition. But I am old. I am strongly conservative by nature. I was brought up in the most rigid form of unchanging religion, was trained upon the oldest masters in literature and the arts, and taught to fear and detest every innovation, every sign of ‘ progress,’ every departure from established rules and from accepted or natural beauty as hideous, dangerous, sacrilegious, and vulgar. Yet very early in life I made one great discovery for myself. I found afterwards that Aristotle had made the discovery also, and had expressed it in the succinct beauty of Greek: Δις δέ ουκ ένδέχϵτаι. ‘Twice is impossible,’ we must translate it, or ‘You can do nothing twice,’ or ‘Two into one won’t go.’

Nothing can be done twice. That is why my son is right in saying that only bad work goes on forever. He is told, he says, that the Royal Academy of this year is exactly the same as the Royal Academy of the last fifty or sixty years. More than a generation has passed to the grave since I went to the Academy. But I looked at an illustrated guide lately, and I found he was quite right. Subjects, sentiments, portraits, representations of nature and domestic scenes, were exactly the same as I remembered from my early boyhood. Yet nothing can be done twice, as Aristotle and I discovered. Only bad work goes on forever. No matter how men may come and men may go, bad work goes on forever.

How then are we to shake off this incubus of imitation? How emerge from the putrefying charnel of museums? How shatter, disintegrate, or explode? In painting many have struggled for liberty, sometimes with brush, sometimes with fist, as in the animated and bloody contests recently waged against the Passéists in Milanese and Roman theatres. I cannot here pause to distinguish minutely between Divisionists, Pointillists, Intimists (who belonged to the same group), Fauvists (savages), Orféists, Cubists, Expressionists, Vorticists, and Dynamists. In so far as all are in alliance against the Passéists, despite violent and bloodthirsty disagreements among themselves, all may be called Futurists.

But the Futurist proper has a place by himself, though when you reach his place, you generally find he has gone somewhere else — somewhere onwards, as his name implies. For the moment — perhaps for this passing week — we may say that the Futurist painter refuses to paint representations. He leaves representation to the Passéist and photographer. He paints what he calls a plastic abstraction of an emotion, an expression or concentration of life as it appears to a spectator. He paints a state of mind. But the mind is usually, perhaps always, in a state of excitement under the stress and stimulation of modern life, under the excitement of noise, of danger, of mechanical power, but especially of speed: the speed of galloping horses, — horses with twenty legs, — of motors so rapid that the houses lean sideways, of aëroplanes roaring like dragons over a terrified world, of rebel crowds rushing forward in acute angles of scarlet passion that impinge upon the habitations of established custom and knock them into cocked hats.

Painting to the Futurist is no pretty, soothing art to be hung in a room and discussed at discreet dinner-parties. Like all Futurist work, it is inspired by adventure and discovery. It is a violent stimulant, to be taken only now and then, — deadly as whiskey, if too often repeated; but never an opiate, never narcotic with sleep. The Futurist destroys everything soft, gracious, effeminate, subdued, and moribund. He works with brilliant colors and sharp angles. He strives to find plastic equivalents for all appearances of our actual life — its noises, smells, music-halls, factories, trains, and harbors. He tells us that noises and smells may be in form concave or convex, triangular, elliptical, oblong, conical, spherical, spiral; and as for their color, he says the smell of machinery and sport, for instance, is nearly always red; the smell of restaurants and cafés is silvery, yellow, or violet; the smell of animals yellow or blue. Let us not laugh too soon. Noises and smells are only states of mind, and we talk of jealousy (which is a state of mind) as green or green-eyed; in anger we say we ‘see red; ’ in melancholy we ‘have the blues.’

In sculpture, even more than in painting, we are overwhelmed by the past. ‘All sculpture galleries,’ says Boccioni, the Futurist sculptor, ‘are reservoirs of boredom, and the inaugurations of public monuments are occasions for irrepressible laughter.’ The Italians feel this even more than we do, for they are oppressed by memories of Michael Angelo as well as by Greeks and Romans; the working of marble is a specially Italian craft; and they cannot take their monuments like us with a kindly shrug as the inevitable penalty of fame, or an inscrutable decree of Providence. In sculpture, therefore, the Futurist must readily obey his master’s precept, ‘ to spit every day on the altar of Art.’

Away with this imitation, this moribund immortality, this monotonous nudity of nymphs and Psyches, Ledas with swans, Dianas in boots, Venuses in nothing — all these weary vistas of plumpy breasts and rounded thighs that the words ‘sculpture gallery’ call up! No more nudes! Futurist sculptors and painters agree on that: not that nudity is immoral, but that it has become a bore. It is lifeless, and art must display action and vitality. Let the sculptor work in what material he likes, even in marble, if he likes it. But his figures must hint at their surroundings — their ‘ambiance.’ They must reveal the emotion of the spectator, and not represent the final lines of eternal form. The sculptor must throw his subjects open like a window. Even portraits should not necessarily resemble the model. Above all, the emotion conveyed must be modern, unconnected with classical mythology, ‘ ideals of beauty,’ or other tombstones.

In Futurist music we find the same violent reaction against the monotonous repetition and elegant ecstasies of the past. Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, says the Futurist, were all very well in their time. They held the advance-posts of their day; so did Pheidias and Michael Angelo; so did the builders of Venice and Oxford. Let us leave them where they stand. Let us honor them with an annual concert, just as we may visit a picture-gallery or museum once a year without perishing of putrefaction. But the modern world has emotions, and lives under conditions, which the composers of the eighteenth and even of the nineteenth century could not conceive.

Noise, for instance, is a modern creation. There is very little noise in nature — only earthquakes, thunder, waves, winds, waterfalls, lions roaring, parrots screaming, nightingales singing. In the last fifty years, what an immense advance man has made upon those primitive sounds! Think of the express train as it yells and roars! Parrots and lions are child’s play in comparison. Think of a cotton-mill, a printing press, an iron-foundry ! Think of the pistons of an ocean liner, the cannonade of a dreadnought, the clang of shipyards! Think of the shriek of circular saws, the hooting of motors, the clatter of milk-cans, the aëroplanes whiffling and burbling through the sky! By an ideal or imaginative combination of such noises, is it not possible to create a new acoustic pleasure, a new development of music, adapted to modern emotions and modern ears?

At the Coliseum in London we have lately (June, 1914) seen and heard what the Futurist can do with sound. There stood the enormous instruments, a dream of elephantine megaphones, for the most part worked by the turn of a handle, like barrel-organs. Oh, what a saving of the singer’s shrieks, the pianist’s practicing, the violinist’s inflictions! The Roarer, the Whistler, the Murmurer, the Screamer — so were the instruments named. Other instruments supplied the outcries of mankind and animals; others the clang of blows upon metals. The first and most beautiful composition or combination aroused the emotion we feel at the ‘Awakening of a great City.’ We can imagine it. The very houses have been asleep. With a faint murmur the giant heart begins to stir. The mail-carts rumble in the distance. The market carts plod to Covent Garden. A belated taxi rushes by. The workmen’s trams begin to roar and ring. There comes a sound of hurrying feet upon the pavement. The war-whoop of the milkman echoes down the street. Doors slam. Cooks scour the steps. Machinery hisses and screams. Hammers crash upon iron plates. Trams, motor ’buses, and taxis reduplicate their rumbling, their clangor, and hoots. City trains rage shrieking past the very windows. All these noises and sounds combine into a rich diapason, varied and illuminated by outstanding notes, like flashes of lightning against the background of a storm. The sun rises. The city wakes. Man goeth forth to his labor until the evening.

Again I would say, let us not laugh too soon. I remember with what laughter, with what mockery, Wagner was received — Wagner with his ‘Music of the Future’ — his Futurist music!

III

And then there is literature — poetry, imaginative utterance, the expression of emotion in words. Of this art Marinetti himself is the Futurist master. I will not here examine his theory of ‘free verse’ — verse released like Walt Whitman’s from metre, rhyme, and form; nor his later practice of abolishing all stops, adjectives, adverbs, tenses, and moods (except the infinitive), of introducing mere sounds to express the sense, and marking expression or coupling sentences with the usual algebraical signs for addition, multiplication, and so on. His poems are now a series of violent and unconnected nouns, infinitive verbs, and strange sounds, interspersed with mathematical signs that make the printed page look incomprehensible. But to the layman a page of musical score looks incomprehensible too. Wait till the musician begins to play! I have heard many recitations, and have tried to describe many scenes of war. But I listened to Marinetti’s recitation of one of his poems on battles and then I knew what he meant by ‘wireless imagination.’

I may very well have witnessed the event he described, for he was with us in the Bulgarian second army outside Adrianople in the autumn of 1912. But I have never conceived such a description, or heard such a recitation. The poem described a train of Turkish wounded, stopped and captured on its way by Bulgarian troops and guns. The noise, the confusion, the surprise of death, the terror and courage, the grandeur and appalling littleness, the doom and chance, the shouting, curses, blood, stink, and agony — all were combined into one great emotion by that amazing succession of words, performed or enacted by the poet with such passion of abandonment that no one could escape the spell of listening. Mingled anguish and hope as the train started; rude jolts and shocks, and yet hope; the passing landscape, thought of reaching Stamboul. Suddenly, the air full of the shriek and boom of bullets and shells; hammering of machineguns, shouting of captains, crash of approaching cannon. And all the time one felt the deadly microbes crawling in the suppurating wounds, devouring the flesh, undermining the thin walls of the entrails. One felt the infinitely little, the pestilence that walks in darkness, at work in the midst of gigantic turmoil making history. That is the very essence of war. That is war’s central emotion.

I know all that can be said against such methods in literature as in other arts. Free verse and words without syntax may become too easy for beauty, since the beautiful is always hard. (Though, on my conscience, I believe it is easier to write verse than prose!) I know all the objections. I only insist upon the meaning, the intention of Futurism, and the impulse that drives to it. With Goethe, I say, ‘If you insist on telling me your opinions, for God’s sake, tell me what you believe in! I have plenty of doubts of my own.’ A well-known poet and critic, Mr. Newbolt, has, I believe, sought to discredit Marinetti’s method by transposing Keats’s ‘Ode to the Nightingale’ into Futurist language — a succession of nouns, infinitive verbs, and mathematical signs. The mockery is beside the point. Keats expressed the emotion called up by the nightingale exactly right. But the nightingale has had a long innings. He has been in from Sophocles to Keats, and perhaps it is time now to declare his innings over. Let the new emotions of a new age have their turn. ‘We sing the love of danger,’ cried the Futurists, in their first manifesto (February, 1909). There is nothing about nightingales in that manifesto. It says: —

‘The essential elements of our poetry shall be courage, daring, and rebellion.

‘There is no beauty except in strife.

‘We shall glorify war, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the contempt for effeminacy.

‘ We shall sing of the great crowds in the excitement of labor, pleasure, or rebellion; of the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capital cities; of the nocturnal vibration of arsenals and workshops beneath their violent electric moons; of the greedy stations swallowing smoking snakes; of factories suspended from the clouds by their strings of smoke; of bridges leaping like gymnasts over the diabolical cutlery of sun-bathed rivers; of adventurous liners scenting the horizon; of broad-chested locomotives prancing on the rails, like huge steel horses bridled with long tubes; and of the gliding flight of aëroplanes, the sound of whose screw is like the flapping of flags, and the applause of an enthusiastic crowd.

‘Your objections? Enough! Enough! I know them! It is agreed! We know well what our fine and false intelligence tells us. We are, it says, only the summary and the extension of our ancestors. Perhaps! Very well! . . . What matter? . . . But we do not wish to hear! Beware of repeating those infamous words! Better lift your head!

‘Erect on the topmast pinnacle of the world, once again we fling our defiance to the stars.’

It is violent, it is insolent. But as I listen to it, I seem to myself like Moses, when he came from Egypt’s land of tombs and solemn pyramids — from among monuments of neverending death in life — from among monstrous cats and bulls and crocodiles sanctified by the inexhaustible stupidity of custom — and stood upon Pisgah, gazing out over the land of promise. As Robert Browning, one of our antiquated poets, said last century: —

Standing on such a Pisgah height, with dying eyes I look out upon a Futurist world of strife and tempest and struggling crowds, — a world of revolt and rebellion, smitten by the acute angles and crimson bars of rage, — a world risen in violent reaction against weakness and sentimentality, invalidism, comfort, softness, luxury, and effeminate excess, — against the toy woman (la femme bibelot), the worship of precedent, of research, of rules, of uninspired morality. Such a world shudders at the monotony of regulated habit and established reputation. That a thing has been done once is for it a sufficient reason why it should never be done again. And moving about in that world of hard and dangerous life that is full of rapid contrasts and calls out the highest human capacities from hour to hour, I appear to see magnificent and adventurous men, tempestuous and proud, fighting their way side by side with magnificent and adventurous women, virile, gigantic, devoid of shame, loathing effeminacy, giving the breast to superb and violent infants, turbulent as Titans of the earthquake and volcano.

As I gaze, I sometimes think that the Futurist parents are in for a stormy time. But no matter! Let us hand on to them our motto: ‘De l’audace, de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!’ Which one may translate: ‘Be bold, be bold, there is not the smallest fear that any one will be too bold.’