One thing can be said of Signor Marinetti, the pope of Futurism, which no one, I fancy, will deny. He is the most amusing writer in Italy. His idea of beauty is a massive building of concrete in course of construction with the scaffoldings lovingly embracing it. His idea of ugliness is a curve of any kind--save in the feminine body. "Parole in libertà," words free from syntactical shackles are the words with which we shall fight the battle of the future. They are the dynamite which will blow asunder literary Monte Testaccio, in which are buried the useless literary labors of his forebears but which shall also prepare the soil for a fertility that it has never possessed. Dynamism is the master-key. No artificer of the past or wizard of the future can construct a lock that it will not readily open, and as for political manacles they are as fragile as rubber bands when confronted with the doctrines of his new book, "Democrazia Futurista." Signor Marinetti has no delusions of grandeur; he only pretends that he has. Nor is he the victim of a mental disorder which is characterized by loss of insight and megalomania. It is gratifying to be able to make this diagnosis of one of Italy's literary leaders. It offsets the diagnosis of general paresis made of Woodrow Wilson by one of Mr. Marinetti's fellow citizens and published with such elaborate attempts of substantiation in the _Giornale di Italia_. He merely overestimates his intellectual and emotional possessions, but he says many clever things and makes some prophecies that are likely to come through. The last European ruler who talked and acted as Signor Marinetti does got a bad spill, as is now fairly widely known. In reality, Marinetti is a Bolshevik who amuses himself behind a mask, but not all the principles of Bolshevism are bad by any means, nor even are they new. The most telling way of making a statement is to overstate it. The most successful way of getting a bad smell out of a house is to burn the house; then, if you have a good plan and plenty of time, money, and building material, you can construct yourself a house free from bad odors. However, there are other ways of making it a very livable and beautiful house, but why one should object to Mr. Marinetti's building his own house his own way is difficult to understand, unless in so doing it he makes himself such a nuisance to his neighbors that they cannot tolerate him. So far he has not done that, but when he joins force with Signor Bruno Corra, as he has in "L'Isola dei Baci" ("The Island of Kisses"), he comes perilously near it.