n
example of his manner to the following passage from his summons to the
young to destroy the museums, the libraries, and the academies ("those
cemeteries of wasted efforts, those calvaries of crucified dreams,
those ledgers of broken attempts!"):

Come, then, the good incendiaries with their charred fingers!...
Here they come! Here they come!... Set fire to the shelves of the
libraries! Deviate the course of canals to flood the cellars of the
museums!... Oh! may the glorious canvases drift helplessly! Seize
pick-axes and hammers! Sap the foundations of the venerable cities!

The oldest amongst us is thirty; we have, therefore, ten years
at least to accomplish our task. When we are forty, let others,
younger and more valiant, throw us into the basket like useless
manuscripts!... They will come against us from afar, from everywhere,
bounding upon the lightsome measure of their first poems, scratching
the air with their hooked fingers, and scenting at the academy doors
the pleasant odour of our rotting minds, marked out already for the
catacombs of the libraries.

* * * * *

That is a vivid piece of humour. It is as amusing as Marinetti's
portrait of himself at the Dore Gallery--a portrait the head of which
is a clothes brush and the hat a tobacco tin--a toy which would be in
its right place, not at an exhibition of paintings, and sculpture, but
in the nursery squares of Mrs Bland's Magic City.

As a matter of fact, however, Futurism as an artistic method seems to
have only the slightest connection with Marinetti's
neo-Zarathustraisms. The Futurist painters give us, not the blood
that Marinetti calls for, but diagrams as free from implications of
bloodshed as a weather-chart or the illustrations in an engineering
journal. These artists are not primarily concerned with protesting
against the conversion of Italy into a "market for second-hand
dealers." They aim at inventing a new kind of art which shall be able
to paint, not objects in terms of form and colour, but the movements
of objects and the states of mind of those who see them. They have
invented a jargon about "simultaneousness," "dynamism," "ambience,"
and so forth, which is about as impressive as the writings of Mrs
Eddy; and they paint in the same jargon in which they write. "Paint
the soul, never mind the legs and arms," recommended the cleric in
_Fra Lippo Lippi_. "Paint the simultaneousness, never mind the legs
and arms,"