Yet, taking the matter in its broad lines, M. Marinetti's programme for "the indefinite physiological and intellectual progress of man" expresses admirably the whole theory of the Nietzschean Superman. Nietzschean also are such phrases as, "the type inhuman, mechanical, cruel, omniscient and combative," or "the multiplied man who mingles with iron, nourishes himself on electricity, and only appreciates the delight of the danger and of the heroism of every single day." The real distinction lies in the fact that the Futurist Superman is more practical, more concrete, more up-to-date, and, above all, infinitely less dreamy than his elder and more pedantic brother.
And in spite of M. Marinetti's analysis of Nietzscheanism as nothing but the artificial resurrection of a dead and past antiquity, the two ideals are harmonious in their denunciation of the facile and automatic reverence for "the good old days," and their savage exhortation to "sweep away the grey cinders of the Past with the incandescent lava of the Future."
This announcement of a virile desire to improve and improve and improve, not only on the past but also on the present, constitutes the principal mark in the Futurist platform. Hence the leaders of the movement have coined the two words _passéisme_, the object of their onslaught, and _Futurism_, the watch-word of their faith. And truculently pushing their theories to the extreme limit of extravagant logic, M. Marinetti and his brothers in arms exhorted the assembled Venetians, in the 200,000 multicoloured manifestos which on a certain memorable day they flung down into the Piazza San Marco, "to cure and cicatrize this rotting town, magnificent wound of the Past, and to hasten to fill its small foetid canals with the ruins of its tumbling, leprous palaces." But the remedy is constructive as well as destructive.
"Burn the gondolas, those swings for fools, and erect up to the sky the rigid geometry of large metallic bridges and factories with waving hair of smoke; abolish everywhere the languishing curve of the old architecture."
We see at once how, in this more than Wellsian enthusiasm for all the romantic possibilities of a scientific civilisation, they declare the most sanguinary war _à l'outrance_ with that Ruskinian and Pre-Raphaelite sentimentalism which, sublimely burying its mediæval head in the immemorial sands of a crumbling past, is somewhat ill-adapted to confront the onrushing simoon of an increasingly definite and formidable future. And with the deliberate object of emphasizing his point with the maximum of provocative aggressiveness, the Futurist will fling at his enemies the insolent paradox that a motor-car in motion has a higher æsthetic value than the Victory of Samothrace, or announce with theatrical solemnity that the pain of a man is just about as interesting in their eyes as the pain of an electric lamp, suffering in convulsive spasms and crying out with the most agonising effects of colour.