These aphorisms belong to the pen of Marinetti or to those of his disciples, who are but pigmies in comparison with their leader. They greeted the war with Turkey in Tripolitania enthusiastically, and Marinetti joyously witnessed the splendor of "bayonets piercing human bodies" and similar features of the great "health-giver"--war. At that time he began the cycle of his pictorial poems recently published in the Words at Liberty. Here is one of his early descriptions: A stream. A bridge. Plus artillery. Plus infantry. Plus trenches. Plus cadavers. Dzang-bah-bakh. Cannon. Kha-kh-kha. Mitrailleuse. Tr-r-r. Sh-sh-sh-sh. S-s-s-s-s-s. Bullets. Chill. Blood. Smoke. To complete the character of Marinetti I shall quote his article in The London Daily Mail in which he states his "profound disgust for the contemporary stage because it stupidly fluctuates between historic reconstruction (pasticcio or plagiarism) and a minute, wearying, photographic reproduction of actuality." His ideal is the smoking concert, circus, cabaret, and night-club as "the only theatrical entertainment worthy of the true Futurist spirit." "The variety theater is the only kind of theater where the public does not remain static and stupidly passive, but participates noisily in action." The variety show "brutally strips woman of all her veils, of the romantic phrases, sighs, and sobs which mark and deform her. On the other hand, it shows up all the most admirable animal qualities of woman, her powers of attack and of seduction, of treachery, and of resistance." The variety theater is, of course, antiacademical, primitive, and ingenuous, and therefore all the more significant by reason of the unforeseen nature of all its fumbling efforts.... The variety theater destroys all that is solemn, sacred, earnest, and pure in Art--with a big A. It collaborates with Futurism in the destruction of the immortal masterpieces by plagiarizing them, parodying them, and by retailing them without style, apparatus, or pity. At this point I am ready to agree with the Russian critic, A. Lunacharsky, who thus defines Marinetti: He combines in his personality the exoticism of an East-African with the cynical blaguerie of a Parisian and the clownishness of a Neapolitan.