ABSTRACT
At the Bechstein Hall on Tuesday Signor Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement, gave a lecture on Futurism in literature and art. He read his lectures in French with such an impassioned torrent of words that some of his audience begged for mercy, and of his sincerity there can be no question, but his doctrines are a morbid form of destructive revolution. There is no beauty according to the Futurist except in violence and strife; every museum and all the great works of the past should be utterly swept away. We have no longer time, said the lecturer, to weep over tombs, and he proceeded to outline his ideal world of the future and showed a place so stripped of all tenderness and beauty that an American was overheard to say that it would be like New York at its worst. He explained that he could say little of the pictures now on show at the Sackville Gallery, the painters of which claim that they have found the sense of speed and paint states of mind, not objects, without having them before them, and went on to read three Futurist poems. Two were in Italian and dealt with a suicide and his watch, and with a lunatic asylum; the third, a French one of his own composition, glorified an automobile in work of destruction. He ended with a passionate defence of war. Whatever element of truth may underlie doctrines deprecating an excessive veneration for the past the anarchical extravagances of the Futurists must deprive the movement of the sympathy of all reasonable men.
