* * * * * The address referred to also said: “Futurism was first put forward by me for the purpose of renovating and reawakening the Italian race to a true appreciation of the true art in literature as well as in painting and sculpture. Precisely because it has a splendid past, Italy is today in some sort disinherited. The cult of the past is upheld among them by a whole world of interested people, and the Futurist movement in its creative effort is hampered not only by such economic hindrances but by the mental cowardice of people. “In art you must continually advance; those who stop are already dead, or candidates for death. The Romanticism of artists like Baudelaire and Wagner and Flaubert was inspired by two or three principles which are worn out today. ‘Salambo’ was the type romance of that old sensibility. In a certain sense such Romanticism is the identification of the idea of beauty with the idea of woman. We are at the end of that period. “Woman as the center, the obsession has already gone out of poetry. As a leit-motif she has no longer the same force; other problems have taken her place. According to our view, poetry is nothing but a more intense, a more exalted, life--and that is why we combat the constant intrusion into it of the ‘domestic triangle’ in various forms, and which has been its ruin. “Now, Futurists are found everywhere. In England you have H. G. Wells. We all realize the need to be more rapid, more intense, more essential, and though our method of expression has been stigmatized as ‘telegraphic lyricism’ I take no exception to that so long as it makes people talk and brings them to examine our underlying rules of action. “Art, either plastic or active, is not a religion. It is the best part of our strength, of our physiological being. It is, in consequence, absurd to consider it as a system, as something to worship with joined hands; it should express all the intensity of life--its beauty, greatness, its fire, its brutality, its sordidness. “Futurism in poetry represents a realism profound, rapid, intense--the very complex of our life of today.” XII VIRILE-IMPRESSIONISM What is happening in America? Exactly what might be expected in a _young_, _vigorous_, and _virile_ country. America has been keenly susceptible to art influences from every section. Her students are everywhere, her exhibitions are gathered from the four quarters of the globe. She is very much alive to what Europe is doing, she has long been interested in what China and Japan have done. While her art is in the main conservative, it is not the conservatism of stubbornness or stolidity, it is rather the conservatism of isolation; but her isolation is a thing of the past. Communication is so frequent, travel so easy, transportation so cheap, that both art and artists flow hither and thither almost unrestricted.