That amazing propagandist, Signor Marinetti, of Milan, who favours me from time to time with his manifestos, now sends “La Danse Futuriste.” I confess that I have not a ha’porth of Futurism in my composition. I am what Signor Marinetti would himself call a Passéiste, a mere Pastist. Hence I have generally failed to discover any meaning in these manifestos, and have thrown them into the waste-paper basket. But as the present one happens to arrive at the same time as another Futurist tract—Signor Ardengo Soffici’s “Estetica Futurista”—I have read the two together, to see if one throws any light on the other. It is right to say that “the” Soffici (to adopt an Italianism) disclaims any connexion with “the” Marinetti, explaining that he puts forward a doctrine, whereas official Futurism has no doctrine, but only manifestos. It couldn’t have, he rather unkindly adds, seeing that its very nature is “anticultural and instinctolatrous.” (Rather jolly, don’t you think, the rich and varied vocabulary of these Italian gentlemen?) Nevertheless, I have ventured to study one document by the light of the other; and, if the result is only to make darkness visible, it is a certain gain, after all, to get anything visible in such a matter. And first for the Marinetti. His manifesto begins by taking an historical survey of dancing through the ages. The earliest dances, he points out, reflected the terror of humanity at the unknown and the incomprehensible in the Cosmos. Thus round dances were rhythmical pantomimes reproducing the rotatory movement of the stars. The gestures of the Catholic priest in the celebration of Mass imitate these early dances and contain the same astronomical symbol—a statement calculated to provoke devout Catholics to fury. (I should like to hear the learned author of “The Golden Bough” on the anthropological side of it.) Then came the lascivious dances of the East, and their modern Parisian counterpart—or sham imitation. For this he gives a quasi-mathematical formula in the familiar Futurist style. “Parisian red pepper + buckler + lance + ecstasy before idols signifying nothing + nothing + undulation of Montmartre hips = erotic Pastist anachronism for tourists.” Golly, what a formula!