T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism 0754640884, 9780754640882

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T. E. HULME AND THE QUESTION OF MODERNISM

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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism

Edited by EDWARD P. COMENTALE Indiana University–Bloomington, USA ANDRZEJ GASIOREK University of Birmingham, UK

© The contributors, 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data T. E. Hulme and the question of modernism 1.Hulme, T. E. (Thomas Ernest), 1883–1917 – Criticism and interpretation 2.English literature – 20th century – History and criticism 3.Modernism (Literature) – Great Britain I.Comentale, Edward P. II.Gasiorek, Andrzej, 1960– 828.9'1209 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data T. E. Hulme and the question of modernism / edited by Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-4088-4 (alk. paper) 1. Hulme, T. E. (Thomas Ernest), 1883–1917. 2. Modernism (Aesthetics) 3. Modernism (Art) 4. Modernism (Literature) 5. Philosophy, Modern. I. Title: Thomas Ernest Hulme and the question of modernism. II. Comentale, Edward P. III. Gasiorek, Andrzej, 1960– B1646.H84T4 2006 192–dc22 2005034559

ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-4088-2 ISBN-10: 0 7546 4088 4

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.

Contents Contributors Introduction On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek 1

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The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks Paul Edwards

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A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language Andrew Thacker

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‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme Rebecca Beasley

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Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis Alan Munton

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T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’ Helen Carr

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Hulme’s Compromise and The New Psychologism Jesse Matz

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Hulme Among the Progressives Lee Garver

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Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?: Politics, Machine Aesthetics, and Religion Andrzej Gasiorek

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‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and Two Trajectories of Ethical Anti-Humanism Todd Avery

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The Politics of Epochality: Antinomies of Original Sin C. D. Blanton

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Hulme’s Feelings Edward P. Comentale

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Bibliography Index

231 243

Contributors Todd Avery is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. He has published articles on Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and modernist ethics, and he is currently completing a book on literary modernism and early British radio. Rebecca Beasley is Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she teaches modernist literature. Her articles on modernism and the visual arts have appeared in American Literature, New Formations and Paideuma, and she has recently completed a book on Ezra Pound and visual culture. A short book on the poetics of Eliot, Pound and Hulme is forthcoming in Routledge’s Critical Thinkers series. C. D. Blanton is Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University. He has written on Robert Browning, T. S. Eliot, poetic translation, regionalism in British poetry, and the problem of nominalism in modernist aesthetics. He is currently working on Aftereffects, an analysis of late modernism in British poetry, and Untimely Histories, a study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms of poetic historiography. Helen Carr is Professor of English at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is a co-editor of the journal Women: A Cultural Review, and her publications include Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions (Cork University Press/New York University Press, 1996) and Jean Rhys (Northcote House/British Council, 1996). Her group biography of the imagist poets The Verse Revolutionaries is forthcoming from Jonathan Cape. Edward P. Comentale is an Associate Professor of Literature at Indiana University. His teaching and research focus on modernism, the avant-garde, and twentiethcentury popular culture. He is the author of Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 2004) and the co-editor of Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (Indiana, 2005).

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Paul Edwards is Professor of English and History of Art at Bath Spa University. He has written extensively on Wyndham Lewis and early modernism, and he is the author of Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (Yale University Press, 2000). Lee Garver is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Butler University. He has published on Katherine Mansfield and written introductions to volumes eight and nineteen of The Modernist Journals Project online edition of the New Age. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled ‘Recovering Radical Modernism: The New Age and Edwardian Cultural Conflict’. Andrzej Gasiorek is a Reader in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (Edward Arnold, 1995); Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (Northcote House, 2004); and J. G. Ballard (Manchester University Press, 2005). He is co-editor of the electronic journal Modernist Cultures (www. modernist.bham.ac.uk). Jesse Matz is Associate Professor of English at Kenyon College. He is author of Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction (Blackwell, 2004). He is currently at work on two projects: a book on the cultural uses of narrative temporality and a book on the legacies of Impressionism in contemporary culture. Alan Munton is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth. His research interests include European Modernism, the literature and politics of the 1930s, and contemporary poetry and film. He has recently published articles on Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, and Ken Loach, and he is the author of English Fiction of the Second World War London (Faber, 1989). He is editor of the Wyndham Lewis Annual. Andrew Thacker is Senior Research Fellow in the School of English, De Montfort University, Leicester. His most recent publications are Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2003) and Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (Routledge, 2005). He is currently completing a short book on The Imagist Poets, and working upon a larger project on Modernist Magazines.

Introduction

On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek

One Sunday morning I had gone to Flemings in Oxford Street for a meal. This was a different kind of establishment from the new-fangled Flemings of today. It had retained quite a Victorian atmosphere, and so had most of the customers, whose appearance suggested that they were food-faddists or Plymouth Brethren or Jehovah Witnesses or something else a trifle odd. . . . On this particular occasion a burly young man with a massive, florid countenance came and sat down opposite me. At first glance I associated him with the open air and rural pursuits. Yes, probably a young gentlemanly farmer spending the weekend in town. He gave his order and then, to my astonishment, unfolded the Observer at the book review page. This hardly confirmed my surmise about him and I was left wondering who he could be. Paul Selver, on first seeing T. E. Hulme, pp. 25-6

T. E. Hulme arrived in London in June 1906 and plunked himself down – quite literally – in the midst of the city’s most advanced artistic and intellectual circles. His striking figure – 6’2” and 14 stone – could be seen in the Oxford Street Flemings, the ABC in Chancery Lane, or the Café Royal in Piccadilly. It muscled its way into the Twenty One Group, the Poets’ Club, and the pages of the New Age, taking charge of the conversation and clearing room for the most radical voices of the day. By all accounts, this young man from Staffordshire made sure that he was a central player in the modernist primal scene, acting the role of café-swinging avant-gardiste with grand aplomb. Yet, as Selver’s statement suggests, Hulme arrived somewhat after the violent habits of modernism had already taken hold, and his self-fashioning was always vexingly contradictory. Hulme seems to have approached the modern scene once it had exposed its more regressive aspects and thus he always addressed it with a keen awareness of its paradoxes. His work, as it adopts one radical position after another, maintains a critical detachment from them all; his life, as it teeters uncomfortably between the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern, throws each of these moments into utter confusion as well as high relief. More pointedly, Hulme, as a self-fashioned public intellectual, seemed to resituate modernism in the complex, uneven trajectories of the public sphere. He certainly was not the first man to enjoy that particularly bourgeois pleasure of reading and eating at the same time, yet his writing wittily conflates reason and

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appetite, foregrounding the tensions between language and the body. His work, in fact, may be one of the first to theorize modernism as a unique social formation founded upon the constant production and consumption of discourse. This collection, then, focuses on Hulme as a figure who was always engaged in the act of digesting the cultural currents of his day. Similarly, it focuses on a moment of modernism that was always pointed elsewhere, to the structural homologies of Victorianism or the shocking discontinuities of postmodernism. This introduction serves to outline the significance of this Hulmean modernism first in relation to other modernist trajectories and then in relation to the history and recent directions of modernist scholarship.

Hulme and the Modalities of Modernity Even in his own day, Hulme was known as a central turbine of modernity’s cultural swelter, addressing, adapting, and channeling the ideas and tendencies of the age. Socially, he was at the center of pre-war London’s most advanced intellectual circles. He was a member of the foundational Poets’ Club and then the Secession Club; he befriended and supported the newly expatriated Ezra Pound; he boxed with Wyndham Lewis in Soho Square; he debated with Rupert Brooke, Bertrand Russell, Jacob Epstein, Henri Bergson, Pierre Lasserre, Georges Sorel, and many others. Professionally, he published on a variety of topics in the most progressive journals of the day. He addressed a dizzyingly wide range of subjects – modern painting and sculpture, Byzantine design, parliamentary reform, colonial preference, pacifism – and he articulated and revised a number of theories – vitalism, impressionism, royalism, Liberalism, Toryism – for a new AngloAmerican audience. A regular for the New Age, he also wrote for Poetry and Drama, Commentator, Cambridge Magazine, and Westminster Gazette. He translated popular versions of Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics and Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. Throughout, Hulme seems the fortunate victim of a particularly modernist wanderlust. His career – even though it was brief – shows a voracious mind, bouncing from one field to the next, from nation to nation, vexed by discontinuities, elated by homologies. Aesthetics, linguistics, philosophy, politics, sculpture, religion – these supersede each other in his work with a vengeance, disclosing the consumerist ideology of the day, yet suggesting a painful quest to provide some other foundation for communal being. Not surprisingly, Hulme’s versatility and his tendency towards overstatement have led to misinterpretations in all directions. While critics have always acknowledged his centrality, they tend either to reduce or to marginalize his ambivalent positions in relation to those of other, more easily categorized modernists such as Pound, Eliot, and even Lewis. But his real significance begins to emerge when we focus on him as one of the most important conduits for modern thought in the pre-1914 phase of a barely emergent British modernism, during which he functioned as a one man Vortex – ‘from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’ (Pound, 1970, p. 92) – and when we see

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that his interventions are emblematic of modernism’s interleaved trajectories. His work, in fact, can be productively moved to the foreground of our discussion and celebrated precisely for its continual self-revisionism, its responsiveness to an uneven history, and its radical commitment to material discontinuities and restraints. Its restlessness provides a running critique of the many restrictive ideologies of the time and, in its seeming contradictoriness, demands a revision of the very categories through which we understand the past and its politics. Hulme’s interest in Bergson’s vitalism, for example, has been read by some critics as a contradictory lapse in an otherwise reactionary career. Hulme is thought to have been swept up in a faddish Bergsonisme before returning to the dogmatism of his later years. A closer look, however, shows that much of what Hulme admired in Bergson’s thought was already present in his own: the emptiness of rational thought, the impossibility of pure vision, the intensive structures of the material world; both thinkers condemned the ideological closure of a rational world and sought release in a more dynamic interplay of self and other. More importantly, perhaps, Hulme’s writings on Bergson actually draw out the phenomenological unity of the latter’s work and thus clarify its broad appeal to modernists of the left and the right; conversely, these writings expose Hulme’s early emphasis on relativism and discontinuity, features that also underpin his later, apparently more conservative, positions. Similarly, Hulme’s interest in Sorel has been reduced to a collusion between uncompromising dogmatists. Hulme’s reading of Reflections on Violence, however, emphasizes the Sorelian critique of liberal ideology and recasts Sorelian ‘myth’ not as fascist demagoguery but working class self-consciousness. In other words, he finds in Sorel’s writing an alternative to modern liberalism that does not necessarily fall toward the fascism to which Sorel was eventually drawn. Discovering in Sorel’s work ‘a return of the classical spirit through the struggle of the classes’, Hulme goes on to claim: ‘It is this which differentiates Sorel’s from other attacks on the democratic ideology. Some of these are merely dilettante, having little sense of reality, while others are really vicious, in that they play with the idea of inequality. No theory that is not fully moved by the conception of justice asserting the equality of men, and which cannot offer something to all men, deserves or is likely to have any future’ (CW, p. 251). Much like Hulme himself, this footnote to Hulme’s essay on Sorel needs to be brought to the forefront of the discussion – not simply because it complicates the critical perception of Hulme as inseparable from a male-centered, reactionary modernism, but because it confounds the categories upon which that version of modernism and its postmodern critique have been founded. It is precisely those aspects of Hulme’s work that made him so popular amongst his contemporaries that force us to reconsider how we study modernism. Hulme’s work proved attractive in its ability to expose the creative destruction of the period and test alternative modes of social organization. On the one hand, we here find Hulme at his most reactionary. His critique of modernity focuses on the reification of romantic ideology and traces its corrupt effects in all areas of thought: liberalism in politics, relativism in philosophy, positivism in science,

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dynamism in the arts. ‘What is at the bottom of this religious conviction?’ Hulme asks. ‘It is a perfectly simple thing. It is a belief in inevitable “Progress”, the belief that the forces of things are themselves making for good, and that good will come even when things are left to themselves’ (CW, p. 222). Hulme’s self-proclaimed classicism served to counter this naïve exaltation of perfectionism with its concomitant, an uncurbed productivism, and to find solid values upon which a more stable social order could be built. Checks and balances were called for in all areas: against emotion in poetry, against liberals in Parliament, against Germans at war. In Hulme’s famous justification: ‘Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him’ (CW, p. 61). Hulme’s classicism, however, was not simply a justification of personal and cultural restraint, but a critical method that worked to expose the inevitable restraints of all historical shifts and paradigms. It points again and again to the body in the public sphere, the grit in the machine, the earth that exceeds and confounds the apparent solution. Throughout, symbolic constructions are proven to be relative and thus subject to deconstruction and collapse. In fact, for Hulme, classicism, fascism, and all other nominal dogmatisms are each only an ‘attitude’, a creation of appetite that must change with that appetite: ‘These little theories of the world, which satisfy and are then thrown away, one after the other, develop not as successive approximations to the truth, but like successive thirsts, to be satisfied at the moment, and not evolving to one great Universal Thirst’ (CW, p. 14). In such statements, Hulme reveals affinities with some of the most thought-provoking and disruptive modernisms of the twentieth century, such as the post-Marxism of Adorno and Arendt, the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the deconstruction of de Man and Derrida. In other words, Hulme is already centrally involved in the inevitable and ceaseless overturning of modernisms that has passed into postmodernity and postmodern criticism. In his work, all history – political, literary, or otherwise – is a modality, a constant recreation of new forms out of the old. It is a difficult, destructive/constructive process, full of gaps and discontinuities, subject to opposition and thus revision. Similarly, Hulme’s typically modernist desire for intellectual synthesis forced him to push beyond the drive for totalization that is so often attributed to modernism in all its variable modalities. His preferred method of choice was analogical, and he sought unusual homologies and collocations through which Europe, if not history itself, could be redeemed. Yet, unlike Eliot and Pound, whose passions tended to elide the particularities of their discoveries, Hulme found that his project consistently ran ashore of irreducible gaps and crags. Despite his best efforts (and they carried him far abroad and far into the past), modernity would not resolve into a coherent whole and history itself seemed to be an uneven, at times regressive process. Tellingly, Hulme defined his own career in terms of a similar unevenness, as an ever-changing modality running up against, and thus renewed by, its own limitations. As he explained, each of his self-adopted dogmas was nothing more than a provisional shell, and a ‘shell is a very suitable covering for the egg at a certain period of its career, but very unsuitable at a later age’ (CW,

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p. 56). The discontinuities in Hulme’s thought appear most starkly in the shifts he made from one field to the next. The most traumatic moment occurred when, after meeting with the anti-liberal Pierre Lasserre, he realized that his Bergsonian metaphysics could not easily be aligned with his Tory politics. Hulme, perhaps bravely, made the conflict public in the pages of the New Age, exposing before his peers the ideological faultlines of his own thought and its bourgeois biases (CW, p. 165). Hulme’s attempt to theorize a historical dialectic and thus the emergence of the modern period exposed similar discontinuities. While a residual Hegelianism in his thought led him to posit an oscillation of romantic and classical periods, the materialist in him knew that history was an untidy affair, fractured in its development and diverse in its effects. He saw in modern art a new turn away from romanticism, but considered that in other fields, particularly philosophy and ethics, ‘the critical attitude of mind which demands romantic qualities . . . still survives’ (CW, p. 65). Even in its final, most dogmatic phase, Hulme’s method remained open to dissonant material factors (the demise of the Liberal party, the reality of trench warfare, Epstein’s sculpture) and thus continued to carry itself beyond itself. In contrast to Eliot or Pound, this classicist continually undermined his own potential absolutism by dramatizing the terms of its all too material construction and disclosing the awkward tensions that ensure change. He was led, even in his final demand for restraint, to proclaim ‘discontinuity’ as the most compelling basis of any epistemic or ethical order, an assertion that also vaunted his hostility to modernist strains in thrall to progressivist optimism: One of the main achievements of the nineteenth-century was the elaboration and universal application of the principle of continuity. The destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, a pressing necessity of the present . . . When any fact seems to contradict this principle, we are inclined to deny that the fact really exists. We constantly tend to think that the discontinuities in nature are only apparent, and that a fuller investigation would reveal the underlying continuity. This shrinking from a gap or jump in nature has developed to a degree which paralyses any objective perception, and prejudices our seeing things as they really are. For an objective view of reality we must make use both of the categories of continuity and discontinuity. (CW, p. 423)

With this principle in mind, all of Hulme’s proclamations take on a new cast. As suggested below, Hulme’s work, at the very moment of modernism’s inception, was already opening up the field to ‘new’ and ‘other’ modernisms: his work provides an engaged model for all recent efforts to theorize the uneven terrain of modernity. This collection of essays, then, asserts that Hulme’s work speaks for a modernism that should be seen as an internally fissured phenomenon. Hulme’s particular brand of modernism offers a unique glimpse into the wider movement’s fundamental contradictions, its productive excesses and complicated hopes. But in making this claim we are striving neither to restore Hulme to canonical status nor to reconstruct a scholarly canon around a unified reading of Hulme. If Hulme is in any way representative of modernism, it is only because his work foregrounds (so

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early in its formation) its inconsistencies and paradoxes. In this sense, he must be read primarily as expressive of a reconfigured modernist field, one that is selfconsciously revisionist insofar as it is riven by its own anxieties, tensions, and indissoluble problems. We intend the following discussion – which spans the multiple topics Hulme addressed – to be characterized by the self-reflexive urgency of Hulme’s own writing. We embrace its many discontinuities and contradictions, recognize its sometimes totalizing impulses, and appreciate its at times chaotic relativism. In fact, if there is any overarching scheme to which the following analyses loosely conform, it is that modernist criticism, in its perhaps traumatic response to modernist history, has become too schematic as well as too fragmented. As some of the essays make clear, modernist scholarship has all too easily drawn up sides and neatly categorized its heroes and villains. Concurrently, celebrations of new alternative modernisms, especially those that seek to recover forgotten or ignored texts and writers, often neglect modernism’s uneven history. In contrast, we see Hulmean modernism as that which can at once expose the deeper complexities of the period as well as its sometimes maddening consistencies. Perhaps Hulme’s earliest work, ‘Cinders’, provides the best model for the modernism we hope to describe and emulate.1 Here, in this seemingly random set of scribbled notes, the young philosopher leaps from one unsatisfactory solution to another. One by one, he deconstructs the attitudes of the age by foregrounding the irreducible contingencies – the particular desires and material restraints – that confound all cultural production. Yet, for Hulme, this critique contained the very hope of renewal. His emphasis on contingency becomes the point at which a potentially more conscious social reconstruction is made possible: ‘A landscape, with occasional oases. So now and then we are moved – at the theatre, action, a love. But mainly deserts of dirt, ash-pits of the cosmos, grass on ash-pits. No universal ego, but a few definite persons gradually built up’ (CW, pp. 11-12). Miriam Hansen offers the best description of this attitude and the modernist challenge it poses for us today. For her, Hulme’s work contains an unusual ‘dialectic of provocation and affirmation’ (Hansen, 1980, p. 371). It displays a typically avant-garde need to ‘explode the organic unity of a poem from within’, yet its emphasis on the ‘fragmentary’ and ‘non-organic’ links human experience with the creation of ‘absolute values’ (Hansen, 1980, pp. 370-1). For Hansen, Hulme’s work recalls Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory; both are informed by a melancholic sense of an ‘empty world’, but, in their unflinching materialism, maintain the possibility of reconstruction, a ‘“new sense of form,” a sense of “construction”’ (Hansen, 1980, p. 379). In this collection we attempt to offer a new sense of Hulme’s work, suggesting that it needs to be ‘constructed’ otherwise than heretofore. What needs to be addressed, then, is precisely how previous critical misunderstandings of Hulme came about, how recent developments in criticism might serve to correct this, and how this collection of essays proposes to help in this revisionary process.

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Modernism, Language, and the Public Sphere Hulme’s thought took language as its theoretical foundation, and it is through this problematic that his modernism can best be defined. Hulme’s intellectual development proceeds from early interests in philosophical nominalism and the construction of poetic form, and it is only out of these original studies that he came to consider more pressing political issues, such as the Bergsonian revolution, the demise of liberalism, and the significance of trench warfare. Moreover, Hulme’s work – in form and content – was geared toward the various institutions of the modern public sphere. His ideas were developed in cafés, at salons, and on the pages of journals; his writings are saturated with the material sites of their production, emphasizing the mood of a lecture hall, the atmosphere of a restaurant, the tenor of a debate. At the same time, his work offers one of the most sustained theoretical accounts of modernist discourse. It expresses an early selfconsciousness about the discursive shaping of mass opinion, deploying the concept of Weltanschauung as a subtle process by which linguistic constructions are naturalized (CW, p. 433). It is precisely these thoughts on language that established his reputation and influence among other modernists. His theories of the image and analogy provided the foundations for modern poetics; his discursive elaboration of ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Classicism’ played a major role in the best political writing of the period, and his accounts of national myths and propaganda initiated a long twentieth-century tradition in British letters that extends in different ways from Wyndham Lewis to Raymond Williams and late twentieth-century cultural studies in general. In its emphasis on language, Hulme’s work sheds much light on modernism not only as a specific literary formation, but also as a significant moment in the history of the public sphere. In several key ways, Jürgen Habermas’s dream of a rational public sphere is already realized in Hulme’s work and social milieu. Certainly, by the late nineteenth century, the logic of capitalism had learned to manage this zone of critical engagement, yet the institutions that fostered debate persisted. In Hulme’s writings, one is struck by the persistence of a bourgeois faith in rational debate, a certain respect for amateur criticism, and a keen desire for intellectual synthesis across institutions. In fact, at its most refined, Hulme’s classicism harks back to the eighteenth-century golden age of genteel salons and genteel debates, and in this guise is a more robust, more modern, version of Ford Madox Ford’s nostalgic longing for a lost world: ‘I should like to see revived a state of things in which port wine and long leisure over the table, and donnish, maybe rather selfish manners and high gentlemanly traditions, possibly a little too heavy drinking, and classical topics for discussion – in which all these things were considered to be the really high standard of living’ (Hueffer, 1915, p. 300). Hulme’s conception (in this, like Ford’s) sought to preserve certain public spaces from the corruption of economics, and thus ensure that citizens could free their minds from passionate interests. But for Hulme it was also from within these spaces that social redress could take place; adopting an anti-Arnoldian stance, Hulme insisted on the link between ideas and practices. Debate within the public sphere entailed the possibility of

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intervening in cultural life in order to bring about change. Astradur Eysteinsson’s view of modernism as ‘an attempt to interrupt the modernity that we live and understand it as a social, if not “normal” way of life’ (Eysteinsson, 1990, p. 6) exactly captures the nature of Hulme’s project – he not only intervened polemically in numerous debates of his day but also engaged in theoretical speculation so as to defend wider socio-political theses.2 Ultimately, Hulme, perhaps more than any other modernist, typifies Habermas’s account of the bourgeois subject as a self-defined amateur critic; he, too, knew of ‘no authority beside that of the better argument’ and felt himself ‘at one with all who were willing to let themselves be convinced by argument’ (Habermas, 2001, p. 41). Hulme, throughout his work, defended these principles and their related ideal of access and consensus: ‘The history of philosophers we know, but who will write the history of the philosophic amateurs and readers? Who will tell us of the circulation of Descartes, who read the book and who understood it? Or do philosophers, like the mythical people on the island, take in each other’s washing? For I take it, a man who understands philosophy is inevitably irritated into writing it’ (CW, p. 7). Hulme’s writing, while always belligerent, shows a remarkable commitment to an open-ended dialectical method. He is as likely to admit his uneasiness over a position as he is to state a viewpoint with dogmatic certainty. In much of his writing he reflects on past intellectual errors, explains why he made them, and then clarifies how he hopes his current thinking will enable him to overcome them. In fact, no matter what the issue, Hulme tends to present both views, and while at times the deck is stacked against one, sometimes he simply throws up his hands and calls upon ‘those people who have perhaps been prejudiced by ignorant and biased criticism to go and judge for themselves’ (CW, p. 262). Karen Csengeri notes that Herbert Read’s version of ‘A Notebook’ gave it a ‘polish’ that ‘obscures the “cindery” aspect of the work’ (CW, p. xxxv). This cinderiness is perhaps the most important feature of Hulme’s writing, which may be declarative in tone but always gives the impression of thought in process, of a vigorous mind worrying at problems even as it announces apparent solutions to them. It often belies the provisionality of the positions he takes up; he states a case in the strongest terms possible in order to invite the expected rebuttal or refutation and thus to promote debate. Several of Hulme’s essays, in fact, were notes written to himself (and not necessarily intended for publication) which goes some way to explaining their unfinished form. But other pieces were originally lectures or articles, and these formats point to Hulme’s passionate commitment to the role of public intellectual actively engaged in contributing to and maintaining the public sphere. Apparently, Tuesday nights at Hulme’s 67 Frith Street Salon occasioned a similar kind of debate. The host was affable, encouraging; he invited thinkers who were diverse in perspective, profession, and nationality (Jacob Epstein, Ramiro de Maeztu, Florence Farr), and his selected topics straddled a myriad issues and debates (ballet, colonial preference, Darwin). According to one participant, Hulme’s character was ‘at once authoritative and genial’, and this ‘made him an ideal leader of such assemblies’; he had ‘a most dominating personality, by means

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of which, however, he used to draw out the opinions of his guests and stimulate debate rather than to impose his own views’ (Jones, 1960, pp. 92-3). Hulme’s chosen outlet for written work – the New Age – operated on similar terms. Under A. R. Orage’s editorship, the journal welcomed scholars of all sorts of professional affiliations; it encouraged a mingling of institutional discourses, and openly proclaimed its commitment to discussion as ‘the rational remedy for everything’. Although the journal was born out of Fabianism, and promoted radical doctrines such as Guild Socialism and Social Credit, it insisted upon political freedom and reasoned debate as the precursor to any progress. As one editorial claimed, ‘friend and enemy of Socialism alike will find the need more and more insistent of some neutral ground where intelligences may meet on equal terms. . . . We shall therefore continue to invite and welcome discussion even when, as sometimes happens, our own cherished convictions are first to be challenged’ (Martin, 1967, pp. 38-9). Other aspects of Hulme’s work and his milieu, however, seriously challenged the logic of the bourgeois public sphere. Hulme, as mentioned, arrived on the scene precisely at that moment when the promises of capitalist order, particularly as they were couched in terms of a beneficent liberalism, began to grow stale. He and his small coterie were able to turn the audience-oriented subjectivity of the bourgeois against itself, directing critical awareness to the ideology of the bourgeoisie itself. In other words, Hulme’s work everywhere wrestles with the Enlightenment distinction of the public citizen and the private soul: it calls into question the ideological dynamic that all too easily universalizes the bourgeois subject and the values upon which the bourgeois world has been constructed. First and foremost, it exposes ‘reason’ itself as an historical formation, contorted by class and riddled with relativity. Any particular position, he argues, ‘may look like an intellectual decision, but it isn’t’ (CW, pp. 207-8). All belief, even Hulme’s own, is driven by ‘instinct’, ‘appetite’, and ‘desire’ (CW, p. 211). More damningly, Hulme exposes the collusion of the rational public sphere with the consumerist logic of the marketplace. Everywhere in his writing, thinking and eating overlap – new ideas, new arts, and new identities feed a market bent on complete reification. In considering whether Bergson is a true philosopher or merely a fad, he writes: The answer to that I should put in this way: the opposing sides in this dispute, I supposed, represented by opposing factions in the market-place – always remembering, of course, that the market-place exists inside of you. These factions represent not only the various views it is possible to hold, but also the force with which these views press themselves on your mind. Beliefs are not only representations, they are also forces, and it is possible for one view to compel you to accept it in spite of your preference for another. (CW, p. 136)

Yet, beyond theory, it is Hulme’s own polemical style that most radically undermines the claims of the rational public sphere. The body – its appetites and desires – intrudes constantly in his prose, inflating, distorting, and contradicting its self-proclaimed sensibility. Interestingly, Hulme tended to exaggerate his North

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Staffordshire accent when speaking in public, and his arguments returned again and again to his rural background. Throughout his writings, too, he affects a certain rustic simplicity, partly macho and partly naïve. He presents himself as a lowminded dilettante, preoccupied with the most vulgar needs and desires. His metaphors are decisively sexual, his images graphically abject. Ideas are merely ‘food’ to be ‘devoured’; they should be judged ‘from the status of animals’ (CW, p. 14). More radically, the threat of physical exposure and violence always lurks within his prose. Famously, in the pages of the New Age, Hulme turned his polemical rage against Anthony Ludovici’s negative assessment of primitive sculpture; after some cursory remarks on Ludovici’s faulty scholarship, he declared that the ‘most appropriate means of dealing with him would be a little personal violence. By that method one removes a nuisance without drawing more attention to it than its insignificance deserves’ (CW, p. 260). Hulme’s style, at once affectedly naïve and spontaneously violent, tells us a good deal about modernity in relation to capital and the public sphere. It both upholds the progressivist ethos of the bourgeois world and undermines it; it advances a dialectic of interestedness and enlightenment, yet inverts its very terms.3 Hulme, in other words, appears caught between historical moments in the history of the public sphere. More succinctly, his fraught polemic exposes the modernist fantasy of immediacy as always already a construction and reveals the postmodern fantasy of complete mediation as a decisively material effect. One might argue, in fact, that Hulme’s peculiar position led him to develop one of the last century’s most progressive accounts of ideology and ideological critique. Yes, his work is notable for its flirtation with political propaganda, its defense of totalitarian mythmaking, and its ultimate celebration of religious dogma. From start to finish, Hulme asserts the inevitability of ideological manipulation and so demands only more effective forms of manipulation. Yet this same work remains keenly aware of ideology’s constructedness, and thus refuses to posit anything but the most pragmatic absolutes. While it systematically denies any essential truth, it recognizes the necessity as well as the possibility of a better truth, a view that accords with his insistence that the Hegelian conception of human progress is spurious metaphysics, and that progress should rather be seen as piecemeal change, as ‘accumulation rather than alteration in capacity’ (CW, p. 241). This position most clearly informs the paradoxical process that Hulme calls ‘conversion’. Since prejudice is unavoidable, he argues, the political thinker can only ask for a clarification of a given position’s ‘first principles’; the factors that determine belief cannot be destroyed, but it is possible to get at their ‘exact contours’ (CW, p. 240). Hulme is not convinced that we can end ideology simply by disclosing its modes of production. Instead, he asks for a self-consciousness or doubling of that ideology, one that removes the ‘veil which hides man’s own real position from himself’ (CW, p. 233). He proposes that ‘exhibiting the intimate connection between such conceptions . . . and certain economical conditions at the time of their invention in the eighteenth century, does more than anything else to loosen their hold over the mind’ (CW, pp. 248-9).

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Hulme’s later writing develops this notion by focusing on its uncompromising materialism and flexible pragmatism. In ‘A Notebook’, he calls for a ‘critique of satisfaction’ by which it is proven that human attitudes are always purposive and thus not only ‘demonstrably false’ (CW, p. 436), but also ‘unsatisfactory’ (CW, p. 438). Clearly, Hulme presents this critique as the foundation of religious experience. It inspires a new ‘attitude of renunciation’ (CW, p. 433), a ‘feeling for certain absolutes, which are entirely independent of vital things’ (CW, p. 426). Yet Hulme also insists that the critical gesture must be continuous, forever shadowing cultural production; renunciation must be constant, inspired by the recognition of humanity’s ceaseless failure and thus by the possibility of better forms. With this apparent paradox, we enter a certain pragmatic modality in which ‘form’ – political or otherwise – ‘follows the need in each case’ (CW, p. 257). As Patricia Rae suggests, Hulme was productively caught between relativism and dogmatism, original sin and absolute ethics: ‘However definitive a theory may seem, however attached emotionally he may have become to it, he must be constantly vigilant to ensure that it is not betrayed by the ongoing performance. When it ceases to be corroborated by evidence, or to be of any practical utility, it must be rapidly dismantled, and another, more satisfactory one erected in its place’ (1989, p. 52). This pragmatism, in fact, plays a key part in all of Hulme’s thought. Preoccupied with the techniques of rhetoric and oratory, Hulme believed that the arts of persuasion depend not on truth-claims but on their power to rouse and sway the emotions. Concern with the falsifying nature of concepts, the ineradicably personal dimension to philosophical systems, the impossibility of gaining an over-arching view of life, and the limitations of abstract thought led to a pragmatist suspicion of language and to the desire for immersion in the real. His emphasis on the need for new vocabularies thus derived from a pragmatist belief that suasiveness depended on an appeal to existing beliefs and from a modernist conviction – which aligns his views on poetry with his views on politics – that linguistic renewal lay at the basis of any wider social renovation. But it was Hulme’s writing and thinking about poetic language that had the greatest impact upon his contemporaries. Here, his work is founded upon the conviction that a transformative potential could inhere in a particular conception of modern art. His theory of the image became a cornerstone of modernist poetics as well as modernist politics in that it emphasized an anti-romantic return to objective language and thus functioned, particularly in the hands of Eliot and Pound, as a critique of a corrupt bourgeois tradition and the abstractions of the market place. For all these writers, the harsh austerity and anti-organic intensity that could overthrow a degraded humanism (all emotional excess and moral uplift) were contrasted to the diminuendo of arts that passed themselves off as new but were actually the pale effluence of aestheticism. But in Hulme we also find a keen materialism, an insistence upon difficulty and restraint that served to curb, at least in his own writings, political excesses. Hulme, for example, insists that the poet ‘turn all his words into visions, in realities we can see’ (CW, p. 24). The empty abstractions of conventional discourse, he writes, need to be replaced with ‘real solid vision or sound’ (CW, p. 24). Indeed, for Hulme, the visual image is only the

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starting point for an even more concrete theory of language. His writings on poetry quickly shift from the thing seen to a tangible objectification of the sign; the image is reconceived as a physical force, a ‘real solid’; poetry, he argues, must approach the condition of sculpture: ‘Each sentence should be a lump, a piece of clay . . . a wall touched with soft fingers’ (CW, p. 25).4 Hulme, then, may yearn for a union of signifier and signified, for a renewed logos, but the strength of this model is that it recognizes the incredibly difficult process of expression. His writings at times privilege a masculinist doctrine of expressive force, but the fantasy of the organic sign is always tempered by the inevitable tensions within language itself.5 For Hulme, language is no less resistant than stone or iron; the poet must shape a stubborn, everyday speech. Similar tensions also inform aesthetic reception: the ideal work of art exerts a tangible pressure upon its surroundings; the hard forms of sculpture and poetry remain in the imagination. Ultimately, the entire creative process, like history itself, is restrictive, bound to a stubborn materiality. The artist is ‘forced’ to use a language that the perceiver ‘feels’. Nothing is created or perceived ‘out of vacuo’ (CW, pp. 26-7). By foregrounding these tensions, Hulme advances a theory of representation that radically undermines the romantic distinction between experience and expression, between world and word. He hints at a more dynamic language and thus a more supple epistemology, one that is both perceptive and creative, conscious and vital. In fact, Hulme’s work consistently proclaims the merits of aesthetic dissonance and formal imperfection. Much like Theodor Adorno’s, it suggests that it is only in the gaps and fissures of discourse that we find critical purchase: ‘philosophers no longer believe in absolute truth. We no longer believe in perfection, either in verse or in thought, we frankly acknowledge the relative. We shall no longer strive to attain the absolutely perfect form in poetry’ (CW, pp. 52-3). Relatedly, Hulme’s celebration of mechanical form in art suggests not simply a defensive male egotism, but a more complex interest in engineering and the difficulties of construction, both of which require conscious thought and an active participation in the creation of new structures and mechanisms. In his account of modern architecture, for example, Hulme assaults the passivity of contemporary artists and calls for an interventionism that is inseparable from the wider process of revisioning that his own aesthetic envisages: At present the artist is merely receptive in regard to machinery. He passively admires, for example, the superb steel structures which form the skeletons of modern buildings, and whose gradual envelopment in a parasitic covering of stone is one of the daily tragedies to be witnessed in London streets. Will the artist always remain passive, or will he take a more active part? The working out of the relation between art and machinery can be observed at present in many curious ways. Besides the interest in machinery itself, you get the attempt to create in art, structures whose organization, such as it is, is very like that of machinery. (CW, pp. 282-3)

Here, Hulme inspires the more progressive work of his heirs, perhaps most notably the Wyndham Lewis of The Caliph’s Design (1919) in his utopian insistence that a ‘complete reform . . . of every notion or lack of notion on the significance of the

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appearance of the world should be instituted’ in order that a ‘gusto, a consciousness should imbue the placing and the shaping of every brick’ in the modern metropolis (1986, p. 28).6 More broadly, we can see that Hulme’s poetics, his emphasis on the phenomenology of language aligns his work with the discursive deconstruction later undertaken by figures such as Adorno, MerleauPonty, and Derrida. Interestingly enough, a modernist who has been often derided as proto-fascist sows the seeds of a much more progressive project of integration, one that is articulated in relation at once to a theory of language and to a nascent radical politics. His work undermines the romantic dream of otherness – gendered, national, or otherwise – and exposes the ways in which all subject positions, whether dominant or dominated, are linguistically constructed through and against each other.

Reconfiguring Modernism/Rethinking Hulme Any attempt to reconsider Hulme’s writings and to make a case for their continuing relevance to modernism entails reflection on the shifts that have in recent years taken place within the field of modernist studies. Up to a decade ago, the postmodernity/postmodernism doublet appeared to have colonized the terrain of late twentieth-century scholarship, the new critical paradigm displacing its progenitor from the centre of debate. Modernism suffered in a number of ways: it was seen as the forerunner of a postmodernism that either completed or broke with it, but that in any case definitively superseded it; dismissed for its elitist advocacy of ‘high’ culture and contempt for ‘mass’ culture; criticized for its positive evaluation of the aesthetic as a category and its subsequent quest for perfection of form and artistic autonomy; deplored for its indifference and/or hostility to alterity; and questioned the role it played in establishing a new literary canon and promoting a formalist critical practice. Modernism, ultimately, was compromised by its association on the one hand with an aestheticist strain that sought redemption in art and on the other hand with the failure of the avant-gardes to transform capitalist society and to resist its power to commodify their protest. The time of postmodernity – seen in periodizing terms as emerging after the Second World War – could then be read as marking the break with modernity and its problematic arts. Postmodernism was seen not only to write finis to a particular historical moment but to inaugurate an anti-foundationalist, anti-transcendentalist sensibility characterized by dissolution of high/low boundaries, respect for otherness, and a playful, ironic, half-serious conception of art and its objects. Postmodernism had its critics from the outset, of course, and its reading of modernism was always contested, but for much of the 1970s and 1980s it set the terms of debate with reference to itself. Recent critics, bored perhaps by increasingly sterile polemics over the exact relations between modernism and postmodernism, have altered these terms of debate by returning to a detailed study of the former, addressing it through a number of questions that differ from previous lines of inquiry. The result has led the concept or category of modernism

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to be reconfigured. Indeed, it appears at times as though we never really knew it at all, a view articulated in T. J. Clark’s contention that ‘the modernist past is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp’, that modernism ‘is unintelligible now because it had truck with a modernity not yet fully in place’ (1999, p. 2 and p. 3). For Clark, this is not to be taken as meaning that we now inhabit a new postmodern age but rather that the modernity heralded by modernism has finally come to pass; postmodernism sets its face against what it thinks of as ‘the ruin of modernity itself’, failing to see that, by way of the ‘holocaust’ of modernization, ‘what we are living through is modernity’s triumph’ (1999, p. 3).7 An alternative view, principally associated with the work of Habermas, is equally sceptical about postmodernism’s hegemonic claims but suggests that a modernity traceable back to the Enlightenment remains an unfinished ‘project’ that needs to be criticized from within so that its emancipatory potential can finally be fulfilled.8 On this view, modernity has not triumphed but has been distorted from its original radical implications. Clark and Habermas offer only two out of many possible analyses of modernity’s history, but their readings of this recent past are symptomatic in that they urge a return to the questions that must still be addressed to the modernity/modernism nexus. How valid are earlier views of modernism as a heroic aesthetic championing the auratic power of art and trying to withstand the pressures of a commodified culture? How was modernism marketed and sold, and what roles in this process were played by authors, literary agents, publishers, readers, libraries, and bookshops – in short, what were the institutional and professional contexts in which modernism emerged? Where should modernism be located geographically (which cities, which countries) and what urban spaces did it traverse (museums, arcades, streets, cafés, department stores)? What is modernism’s past, where are its origins and ends, what is its relation to avantgardism? Should modernism and the avant-garde be seen as historical categories or as trans-historical ‘concepts’ of an ideal type? How does modernism look when considered from the perspectives of feminism, racial politics, or post-colonialism, which raise questions about its formation and self-understanding, focusing on its complicity with strategies of exclusion and appropriation? Recent attempts to answer such questions have resulted in revisionist accounts that have transformed the field of modernist studies. It would be unwise in an introduction such as this to try to cover this ground comprehensively, but it is worth touching on those areas that are pertinent to this volume’s reconsideration of Hulme. In doing this, we propose to cut across what are well established lines of inquiry in order to stress the similarities between their underlying assumptions. Earlier scholarship, while always attuned to the broken shards and luminous details of most modernist writing, seemed inclined to subsume these fragments to a unity of some kind, a view articulated by Bradbury and MacFarlane in their influential book Modernism: ‘there is a preservative element in Modernism, and a sense of primary epistemological difficulty; the task of art is to redeem, essentially or existentially, the formless universe of contingency’ (1978, p. 50). Bradbury and MacFarlane were attentive to the complex interactions between modernism’s

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various strands, but their own revisionist account tended to emphasize form and ideas rather than material practices, to identify modernism with male figures, and to see these figures as somehow able to gain a vantage point outside the social processes they rejected, celebrated, or sought to transform. Conversely, what emerges from contemporary revisionist scholarship is an almost relentless focus on modernism’s multiplicity, plurality, open-endedness, and instability. Modernism is now conceived less in terms of particular movements or individual figures and more in terms of its characteristic tendency to cross boundaries, disturb classifications, and weave together multiple discourses. Critics who have concentrated on this interpenetration of trajectories have tended to invoke a plurality of modernisms.9 These accounts offer detailed empirical work on the relations between modernism’s various strands and rely on theoretical models that construe modernity as a reflexive and multi-dimensional space in which there is a complex interplay between a range of mutually imbricated practices. The emphasis on multiplicity in such accounts militates against totalizing readings of modernism and draws attention to the interested nature of particular critical interventions. New lines of inquiry open modernism out and, as it were, fragment it further still by asking questions that reveal hitherto concealed textual, cultural, and economic relations.10 Feminists and post-colonialists, for example, have reconfigured modernism by pulling previously ignored issues into its orbit. In the process of doing so they have not only uncovered the often undeclared assumptions underpinning previous versions of modernism, but also disclosed the ways in which critical discourses (including their own) construct their object of inquiry in relation to present-day concerns and theoretical paradigms.11 Relatedly, modernism has been opened up by a return to its economic and institutional contexts. For example, its analysis is given over to the complex relations binding readers, authors, markets, and wider social structures, which, in Lawrence Rainey’s formulation, shifts the grounds of inquiry: ‘To focus on those institutions, instead, is to view Modernism as more than a series of texts or a set of ideas that found expression in them. It becomes a social reality, a configuration of agents and practices that converge in the production, marketing, and publicization of an idiom, a shareable language within the family of twentieth-century tongues’ (1999, p. 34).12 Within this perspective, which concentrates on the various consequences entailed by the late nineteenth-century professionalization of writing, modernism ceases to be a heroic project resistant to the imperatives of commodity culture and becomes part of a network of relations firmly placed within the capitalist economy. This does not mean that writers should henceforth be seen as toadies to a system they often deplored, but rather that simplistic distinctions between ‘high’ culture and capitalist markets are wide of the mark; as Joyce Wexler has observed, publishers promoted work that attacked the bourgeois society to which they themselves manifestly belonged, and modernists, while extolling the virtues of obscurity, desired wide readerships (1997, p. xix).13 With one or two exceptions, Hulme criticism has paid little attention to the multi-dimensional aspects of his work and thought. Early accounts of Hulme’s writing concentrated principally on his involvement with the Imagist movement,

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his championing of British avant-garde art and sculpture, and his emphasis on the romantic/classical antithesis. Much of this criticism was bedevilled by the problems caused by the improper dating of Hulme’s essays and by editorial decisions made by Herbert Read when he collected some of Hulme’s writings for the publication of Speculations (1924). A lot of early criticism emphasized the incoherence and derivativeness of Hulme’s thought. Hulme was presented as little more than a mediator of ideas that others had had before him and that they had often explained with greater clarity than he himself could manage.14 Many critics were also preoccupied with the romantic/classical antithesis, which they took to be a central component of Hulme’s work, and some devoted much energy to demonstrating that Hulme was himself deeply indebted to the romantic tradition.15 Yet it is our contention that Hulme’s reversals, confusions, and contradictions speak clearly to the most progressive criticism conducted today. Hulme’s importance to the theorization of new and other ‘modernisms’ can scarcely be over-emphasized, in part because he was so influential to the development of what we now think of as early modernism, and in part because, drawing on so many disciplines in his writing, he transmitted to England many of the European traditions of thought that assisted in modernism’s complex birth. His work can also teach us a lot about our own efforts to shift emphases from auratic works to institutionally embedded practices, from artistic isolation to networks of professional relations, from aesthetic purism to the question of the public sphere. The real critical breakthrough in Hulme scholarship came with Michael Levenson’s work in The Genealogy of Modernism (1982), which identified the dates at which Hulme wrote his essays and clarified the shifts in his thought. Levenson was concerned to establish the intelligibility of Hulme’s various positions and this could only be done, he claimed, if it was grasped that Hulme changed his mind on a number of issues.16 It is from this position that our collection roughly takes its cue. Because Hulme discussed so many of the aesthetic, cultural, and political issues that have loomed large in modernism’s subsequent trajectories, and because he altered his views as his thought developed or new problems hove into view, the work he performed provides valuable insights into modernism’s origins. But if we invoke the notion of origins here it is not to proclaim Hulme as a beneficent progenitor; we see him as a symptom, rather, of the expanded field of modernism with which we are now so familiar. Our depiction of Hulme as a figure of the Vortex aims to direct attention away from the individual as a solitary creative force and to refocus it on the discursive networks to which he belonged. Hulme acts as a template for the clash and play of modernism’s idiolects; his work testifies to its heterogeneity – its contested intellectual traditions, aesthetic tensions, and varied institutional attachments. Nor should our reference to origins be taken to imply a fixation on newness, that characteristically modernist fetish. As Stan Smith has observed of modernism’s negotiations with the past, to be ‘original is to reproduce, or re-produce, that which is there already’ (1994, p. 5). Hulme was in this precise sense an originator: he argued that ‘the first attempt to formulate a different attitude’ is ‘always a return to archaism’ (CW, p. 271), and may thus be seen as a translator and transliterator of

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the diverse traditions that he transformed. A good example of this approach may be found in his discussions of archaism in the work of painters and sculptors such as William Roberts, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, which he argues ‘legitimately finds a foothold in these archaic yet permanent formulae’ but, because it is ‘part of a real change of sensibility occurring now in the modern mind . . . develops from the original formula one which is for it, a purer and more accurate medium of expression’ (CW, p. 266). New artistic creativity arises out of an altered sensibility but is brought into being through a return to art-forms derived from alternative (in this case pre-modern) canons, which it transforms and then discards. For Hulme, this has nothing to do with nostalgia or exotism. It represents a conscious, intellectually motivated attempt to deploy aesthetics as a way of reintroducing a lost Weltanschauung into the cultural arena, thereby opposing progressivist conceptions of post-Renaissance modernity. Throughout, then, we read Hulme’s thought and style as an expression of this dialogical view of perception and cognition: his fractured polemics proclaim what Hugh Kenner, writing on Pound, has described as an ‘aesthetic of glimpses’ (1971, p. 69). The tension between contingent, arbitrary materiality and rational philosophical system everywhere marks his elliptical prose. With feet planted firmly on the cindery ground, his eyes scan the speculative horizon. Thus, while the essays gathered here have been written with an eye to the continuity of Hulme’s thought, they foreground the always provisional, self-skeptical nature of his revelations. As a whole, the collection begins with his theories of language and unfolds chronologically, yet it everywhere exposes the multiple, interdisciplinary connections that any one of his insights may have generated. We will find that his early reflections on language offer a portal to other areas of human experience and endeavour, most obviously to issues raised by philosophy, politics, and psychology; conversely, his final dogmatism forces us to turn back and reconsider what we think about his psychology, politics, philosophy, and language. From ‘Cinders’ through to ‘A Notebook’ Hulme speculates about the nature of reality, the difficulties of knowing it with any degree of accuracy, and the problem of articulating knowledge in words. These concerns are also visible in his Bergsonian phase, which is preoccupied with overcoming the nightmare of mechanistic determinism; his interest in pragmatism, which is connected in turn with his linguistic skepticism and his rejection of unitary metaphysical systems; his articulation of an illiberal but radical ‘Toryism’, which draws on the politics of Action Française, the syndicalism of Sorel, and Proudhon’s anarchism; and his attempted refutation of pacifism on the grounds that the war had exacerbated a situation in which ‘every boundary in Europe, of political, social, intellectual and cultural importance’ (CW, p. 332) was in dispute and that in this situation democratic liberties needed to be defended. These essays, then, offer a contribution to critical study of Hulme’s thought and of the complex role it played in the formation of modernism, and they emphasize throughout that Hulme’s work is always to be located within the overlapping discourses of aesthetics, culture, politics, philosophy, psychology, and theology. The book as a whole focuses on the complex ramifications of Hulme’s thought, situates his work in relation to the

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public sphere in which he was such a vocal, contumacious, and stimulating presence, and notes his impact on modernist thought and culture. More specifically, then, this collection of essays begins with Hulme’s earliest and best known work, as it registers an emergent modernism in the fields of poetry, poetics, and language. The first few essays explore different moments from Hulme’s early years in London and by using interdisciplinary methods track his intellectual peregrinations between cafés, philosophies, and even disciplines. A complex portrait emerges of a new age in which intellectuals and artists groped for appropriate expressive models only to grow preoccupied with the problems of language and expression themselves. In ‘The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks’, Paul Edwards discusses Hulme’s vigorous polemical style and his early poetic experimentation, seeing in both an attempt to reconcile an almost vulgar materialism with the need for abstract systematization. Hulme’s intellectual dependence on physical experience and imagery, particularly as it manifests itself in the rough-hewn edges of Imagist verse, proves the basis of a larger modernist ambivalence, shaping the course of subsequent debates about poetry and poetics. Edwards suggests that the tradition of poetry seen to have been inaugurated by Hulme (and continued by Pound, Williams, and Olson) is typically read as demanding a return to the ‘primal’ in an attempt to overcome the ‘disease’ of language, but he argues that this is an inadequate description of Hulme’s own poetic thought and questions whether any such primal dissolution can emancipate the subject or produce the best poetry. Andrew Thacker’s ‘A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism, and Modernist Theories of Language’ refocuses the discussion of Imagism in terms of the phenomenological relations between language and community, concentrating especially on the modernists’ experience of the alienating, increasingly dehumanized structures of the modern city. Drawing upon post-Marxist theories of modernity and history, Thacker reconceives modernist poetics – and its variously politicized resonances – as a fraught effort to restore an originary unity of word and thing, and thus to resist the perceived commodification of the work of art within modernity. Rebecca Beasley’s ‘“A Definite Meaning”: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme’ locates Hulme in the fashionably contentious salons of pre-War London and reads his aesthetic theories in light of the heated and controversial debates that exercised his intellectual contemporaries. Her essay recreates the complex terrain of the pre-war art world in order not only to expose the conflicted ideologies behind early modernist aesthetics but also to insist on the overlappings and borrowings that characterized positions that were often presented as simply opposed to each other. Beasley reads Hulme’s work as emblematic of early modernism, its unresolved engagement with the arts disclosing a powerful drive to system and order even as it foregrounds the limitations of its own newly emergent discourse. The next group of essays coalesces around Hulme’s work as it sheds light on modern theories of subjectivity. Hulme’s work proves essential here not only in its grappling with conflicting theories of the expressive subject (Freudian, Darwinian, Marxist, etc.), but also in its analysis of the social forces that shape those theories (technology, capitalism, nationalism, etc.). These essays consider Hulme’s

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developing interest in alternative models of subjectivity that stress lesser known areas of modernist inquiry, such as phenomenology and pragmatism; in this respect, Hulme is seen to be struggling with his own Victorian inheritance and bourgeois idealism as he pushes his work toward more radical discoveries. Alan Munton, in ‘Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis’, addresses Hulme’s account of subjectivity in relation to his sometimes willful theories of history and historical transformation. Munton first explores Hulme’s prediction of the break-up of the humanist spirit and his claim to have found, with reference to Wilhelm Worringer, a new ‘tendency to abstraction’ that was primitive in form, but modern in spirit. Munton, however, insists on the need to distinguish varieties of modernist abstraction; he contends that insofar as Hulme downplayed the significance of the new mechanical environment, he was led to a reactionary, fatalistic position regarding human society; Wyndham Lewis, in contrast, saw how machinery and technology impinged on the mind of modern subjects and thus developed a more radical theory of ideology that preserved room for both control and progress. Helen Carr’s ‘T. E. Hulme and the “Spiritual Dread of Space”’ interprets Hulme’s thoughts on humanism in terms of both his lifelong anxiety regarding open spaces and his long-noted ‘hyper-masculine’ posturing. Carr mobilizes philosophy along with psychoanalysis and theories of gender in order to explore the experiences of incoherence and inadequacy that underlie Hulme’s ambivalent postures; she links Hulme’s anxious readings of Nietzsche’s skepticism and of non-western cultural forms to his personal concerns regarding masculine prowess, seeing in this collusion an emblematic moment of the modernist revolution. Jesse Matz’s ‘The New Psychologism’ turns the discussion of the human away from the phenomenology of space towards time, focusing on Hulme’s abandonment of Bergsonian intuitionism and his move towards the static forms of Classicism, anti-humanism, and abstraction. Matz argues that Hulme’s critique of modern psychologism was a category mistake, inappropriately applying philosophical arguments in favor of the attainability of objective knowledge to poetry; the result was an anti-psychological view of aesthetics from which intuition had been expunged and which led to the cessation of Hulme’s own career as a poet. Like Carr, Matz contends that Hulme’s change of mind was motivated by socio-cultural anxiety, principally over the incursion of women into the public sphere; Matz, however, is more critical of the effect this anxiety had on Hulme’s work and on modernity at large: he draws on recent work in cognitive psychology to conclude that Hulme’s defense of a purified ‘objective’ aesthetic diverted literature from its concern with human psychology. The next three essays turn to Hulme’s constantly shifting political allegiances, foregrounding the categorical challenges they pose to modernist scholarship. By situating Hulme’s multi-layered discourses at the origins of early twentieth-century thought, they reconceive the period as well as its legacy, dismantling many of the myths concerning the left and the right still promoted today. Lee Garver’s ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’ looks at the complex political origins of A. R. Orage’s the New Age and Hulme’s early role in setting the paper’s committed polemical tone. Garver sees in Hulme’s writings an expression of the unresolved tensions

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within early modernist political debate; Hulme’s writings reveal how difficult it once was to separate radicals and reactionaries, elitists and populists, socialists and feminists, not simply because these categories were unsettled at the time, but also because figures such as Hulme (in this respect a typical New Age contributor) found themselves able to draw on diverse rhetorics. Emphasizing Hulme’s indebtedness to the radical socialist agitator Victor Grayson (who was briefly a coeditor of the New Age), Garver suggests not only that Hulme was in his early writings a more populist and progressive figure than he is given credit for being but also that his politics cannot be categorized according to hard-and-fast distinctions between left and right. Andrzej Gasiorek, in ‘Towards a “Right Theory of Society”?: Politics, Machine Aesthetics, and Religion’, moves beyond specific political programs in order to reconceive Hulme’s thought within the larger context of modernity’s ‘disenchantment of the world’. Towards the end of his life Hulme’s political allegiances, no matter how contradictory they may seem today, circled around the possibility of a non-liberal democratic theory that drew on Sorelian syndicalism and on Proudhonian anarchism. Gasiorek argues that industry and technology – two potent causes of modern malaise – gave rise to a modernist machine aesthetic that functioned as a template for Hulme’s late anti-humanism and its attendant theology. For Hulme, social renewal and political freedom (albeit in a strictly limited form) were inseparable from a religious conception of humanity’s relationship with the divine. This required an intellectual paradigm shift that not only demanded a break with the presuppositions of a secular modernity but also highlighted the incommensurability of rival ontological positions. In ‘“Above Life”: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and Two Trajectories of Ethical Anti-Humanism’, Todd Avery concentrates on the no less contentious realm of political ethics. His essay focuses on G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica and its formidable influence on both Hulme and his intellectual opponents in the Bloomsbury Group. Avery looks closely at how Moore’s ethical idealism was mobilized by both groups in a series of highly publicized debates both before and during the war; he questions how and why Moore’s idealist reaction could inspire radically opposed views on the issue of human moral capacity and the need for ethical restraint. With this analysis, Avery moves beyond the specificities of Hulme’s moment: he unsettles the modernist antithesis between humanism and anti-humanism and begins to clarify its continuing significance in the present day. The last two essays focus on what may be described as the rhetoric of modernity. They address the ways in which the concept of modernity has been utilized and appropriated by both moderns themselves and their postmodern critics: the first essay discusses the mobilization of ‘modernity’ as a structural concept in debates about history and teleology, while the second essay concentrates on the affective dimension of modernist criticism and the ways in which emotion informs the impasses of traditional thinking about modernity. C. D. Blanton’s ‘The Politics of Epochality: Antinomies of Original Sin’ considers the role that Hulme plays in rhetorically charged accounts of the modern period. Hulme’s career, Blanton argues, often figures as a ghostly sign of a historical modernity that never quite materialized, as a representation of a gap in modern time that is itself –

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paradoxically – representative of the time as a whole. Hulme’s incomplete body of work serves as a kind of modernist shorthand for a compelling logic of temporal dissociation, as such is made manifest in the work of art that signals its own material impossibility, in the promise of historical redemption voiced from within a damning historical moment. Lastly, Edward P. Comentale’s ‘Hulme’s Feelings’ considers what is perhaps the most pervasive, but least discussed aspect of Hulme’s work: the intense emotionalism of his critical thought. Drawing upon phenomenology, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, and postmodern systems theory, Comentale explores Hulme’s emphasis on critical appetite and the intense feelings of anger and sadness that inform his approach to analysis, seeing in both the basis of an animistic ‘adolescent modernism’ that was open to historical change and conceptual revision. Comentale thus argues that it is the emotional register of Hulme’s thought, particularly in its feeling for historical tragedy, that both defines and dismantles the major myths of the modern period, at once willing and denying the age’s potential, pushing us through and beyond the biases that continue to define scholarship today. * * * * * Writing in 1917 Pound claimed: ‘The last few years have seen a gradual shaping of a party of intelligence, a party not bound by any central doctrine or theory’ (Read, 1967, p. 89). This assertion captures what we have been trying to suggest about Hulme’s importance to modernism. If, following Bourdieu, we conceive modernism as a field constituted by a multiplicity of interanimating practices and a variety of institutions through which they are articulated, mediated, and disseminated, then the public roles Hulme played and the discourses he deployed may be seen as paradigmatic of modernism’s interventions in the modernity it sought to transform. Seen as a site of contestation between competing and contradictory elements, modernism becomes an overdetermined phenomenon marked by often unexpected alignments and combinations. Traversed by the very disciplines with which Hulme was throughout his life preoccupied – aesthetics, philosophy, politics, psychology, theology – this modernism testifies to his significance, less as an innovator or an influence (though he was both) and more as a conduit: Hulme not only mediated some of the key ideas to which later writers would regularly revert, but also highlighted many of the still unresolved aesthetic/political dilemmas that would haunt modernism in the decades to come.

Notes 1

In addition to our remarks here, see Dennis Brown, pp. 96-102. Hulme is clear on a number of occasions about his desire to connect his aesthetic reflections with wider social issues. See, for example, CW, pp. 60, 270. 3 Janet Lyon, in Manifestoes, similarly defines modernist polemics and their challenge to the public sphere, p. 34. 2

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Unfortunately, Hulme’s sculptural turn has led critics to dismiss his ideas on language. Frank Kermode, in particular, deplores this aesthetic confusion and argues that the classicist lacks a central theory of language (1971, pp. 132-3). More recently, Ethan Lewis has claimed that ‘Hulme cannot have it both ways.’ For Lewis, this solidity can only fail to be representative as well as concrete; he agrees with Pound that the result will always be, quite simply, ‘mushy technique’ (p. 264). 5 Mark Antliff describes the avant-garde’s advocacy of a ‘sign-system that claims hegemony over others on the basis of its supposedly “transparent and radically ahistorical” nature. By asserting that intuition established an immediate relation between signifier and signified, Bergson and his followers proclaimed their ability to create natural signs, signs whose temporal properties – reflective of the personality – were anterior to and at the origin of all conventional sign-systems’ (p. 11). 6 Lewis’s disgust at artistic passivity in the face of urban change more than matches Hulme’s (1986, pp. 27-8), hence his claim that modern art must escape the studio and find a place in the life of the community: ‘You must get Painting, Sculpture, and Design out of the studio and into life somehow or other if you are not going to see this new vitality desiccated in a Pocket of inorganic experimentation’ (1986, p. 12). 7 For a less negative view of the triumph of modernity, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 1990. 8 See especially Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, 1981 and Richard J. Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity, 1985. 9 Most obviously, in Peter Nicholls, Modernisms, 1995. But it should be noted that Bradbury and MacFarlane also gesture at this multiplicity (p. 48). 10 For examples of such work, see David Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, 2000; Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism, 1999; David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism, 2001; and David Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 1997. 11 For a sample of such work, see Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism, 1991; Alice Gambrell, Women Intellectuals, 1997; Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism, 2 vols., 1995; Rita Felski, Gender of Modernity, 1995. For post-colonial approaches, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 1996; Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby, Modernism and Empire, 2000; Catherine Hall, Cultures of Empire, 2000; Jed Esty, Shrinking Island, 2004. 12 See also Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt, Marketing Modernisms, 1997; Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 1998; and Joyce Piell Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism?, 1997. 13 For a good account of the difficulties early modernist writers faced in trying to negotiate these complicated relationships, see Peter Keating, The Haunted Study, 1991. For accounts that emphasize a split between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 1986 and John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 1992. 14 See, for example, Hansen, ‘T. E. Hulme’, 1980 and J. Kamerbeek, ‘T. E. Hulme and German Philosophy’, 1969. 15 See, for example, Alun Jones, Life and Opinions, pp. 64-5; Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, 1971; and Murray Krieger, ‘Ambiguous Anti-Romanticism’, 1953. 16 Levenson rightly insists that this dating process is of vital importance (and not just in the case of Hulme) because there is a ‘tendency to regard the period as a simultaneous critical moment’, whereas key ‘critical concepts were not generated simultaneously’ and ‘do not all belong together’. Thus: ‘If the ideas of 1915 are assimilated to those of 1912, or the ideas of 1912 to those of 1908, the intelligibility of each is lost’ (p. 37).

Chapter 1

The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks Paul Edwards

‘Who will write the history of the philosophic amateurs and readers?’ asks Hulme in the draft preface to his unwritten book; and despite his ambitions to be a ‘heavy philosopher’ it seems likely that an amateur he would have remained, led always by the instincts that prescribed philosophical conclusions to him and happy enough to let the professionals supply arguments and proofs. He seems in this respect to be an entirely emotional thinker, announcing what he finds desirable at any particular moment, and attentive mainly to the puzzling shifts and contradictions he notices in these desires and interests. It is easy to underestimate his competence and application as a consequence of this, especially as A. R. Orage, at the New Age, was content to indulge his undisciplined ramblings and publish them as ‘instalments’ of a project that appeared to be getting nowhere. There seems no doubt that when Hulme became interested in a subject he would read all he could about it (witness the extraordinarily comprehensive bibliography of Bergson in the English translation of Time and Free Will); but an amateur he remained – the kind of Englishman who is always founding a club, as Pound put it. What was distinctive was that the concerns of his clubs (especially, of course, the informal salon held at Mrs Kibblewhite’s) were serious ideas, not the hobbies and sports that usually preoccupy English clubmen. There is also something not quite sporting in his attitude to those he disagrees with (‘You think that, do you? You——!’) (CW, p. 153), or his belief that a ‘real vital interest in literature’ is proved by an outbreak of fist-fights in a lecture-hall (CW, p. 60). He may have been violently intolerant of opposition, but there is a kind of egalitarian generosity of spirit in the way that he makes us privy to his developing thought processes. Bertrand Russell’s opinion of him as an ‘evil man who could have created nothing but evil’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 242) seems bizarrely wide of the mark. J. B. Harmer, in his study of Imagism, says that Hulme ‘gave up poetry in a fruitless search for intellectual satisfaction’, and he asserts that Hulme will survive by his poems rather than his ideas (p. 52). The essays in this volume show that to be an oversimplification, but it is true that the syntheses (or balanced antitheses) of ideas Hulme was looking for are best served through imagery rather than philosophical argument – at least as he developed it. But the fact that the same imagery can be found in the early notebooks (particularly ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on

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Language and Style’) as well as in more formal prose pieces – shows that a simple division between poet and man of ideas is artificial. Hulme’s poems are ideas, but treated with such delicacy that explication (betraying them to the ‘extensive manifold’) is a questionable activity.1 But explication of the overlapping modes of thought and imagery Hulme employed is nevertheless the purpose of this chapter. In Hulme, then, we have an example of a thinker whose ideas are all, and always, secondary to emotion, feeling and physical impulse. Even his belief in permanent, transcendent values and in God rests on this: ‘It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities’ (CW, p. 61). Hulme has long been thought of as a self-contradictory thinker, and in response to this, attempts have been made to show his inconsistencies as the product of commentators’ demands that ideas he had outgrown should be consistent with what he believed later in his development. Certainly the arrangement of Speculations obscured the fact that Hulme was developing and changing his ideas and exploring their implications until the end. But there are inconsistencies along the way, at any particular moment, as well, and it is only as a process of sorting out and reconciling these inconsistencies as he begins to become conscious of them that Hulme’s development acquires any sort of coherence. What Hulme finally does, in what Karen Csengeri misleadingly (in my view) calls his ‘mature philosophy’, is to wall up his various beliefs within separate discourses, claiming that they are quite independent of each other: ‘There must be an absolute division between each of the three regions, a kind of chasm. There must be no continuous leading gradually from one to the other’ (CW, p. 425). The three regions referred to are ‘(1) The inorganic world, of mathematical and physical science, (2) the organic world, dealt with by biology, psychology and history, and (3) the world of ethical and religious values’ (CW, p. 424). It is not a mature philosophy but a step towards abandoning philosophy altogether in favor of religious faith and practice (CW, p. 432). Because of dissatisfaction with the ‘nightmare of determinism’ implicit in region 1, region 2 is invented, and an unpredictable evolutionary novelty is assigned to it; the (Bergsonian) discourse that is the correlate of region 2 implies a creativity and unlimited potential for man as a life form. But it also makes values a by-product of evolutionary processes and hence lacking in any absolute claim on us. As a corrective, resort is made to a transcendent region of absolute values which makes the ‘creativity’ of region 2 look like a tiny and uninteresting variation of a fundamentally fixed condition.2 Each region has been psychologically needed by Hulme in order both to limit the others and to supplement what is unsatisfactory in each of them; but even as he delineates the three ‘separate’ regions he recognizes the similarity of regions 1 and 3 (in that for him they both have an absolute ‘objective’ character), and it could hardly have been long before his psychological need for region 2 dissipated. Indeed, he had already devoted nearly the whole of the fifth of his ‘Notes on Bergson’ (5 Feb. 1912) to a psychological analysis of how the ‘nightmare of mechanism’ could suddenly cease to be nightmarish, and stated that ‘the simplest way of dealing with mechanism is frankly to accept it as a true account of the nature of the universe, but at the same time to hold that this fact makes no

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difference to ethical values’ (CW, p. 151).3 What he has momentarily forgotten is that only with the freedom postulated by region 2 can human beings be logically subject to the ethical values of region 3. If there is an absolute gulf between these regions, and each is a separate language game, it is philosophically feeble to resort to one in order to escape from the limitations of the others. (This is leaving aside the contentious question of whether these regions are, anyway, actually separate.) As always with Hulme (and this is one of his main attractions), in ‘A Notebook’ we are told the process of how and why he has reached his new position and come to believe that mind is a repository of transcendent values, and Hulme himself recognizes that, as the result of a process, his assertions, though ‘a first step away from subjectivism . . . still remain tainted with it’ (CW, p. 421). Parallel to this, when he predicts a ‘classical revival’ in culture, the classicism that is to come will recapitulate his own development and not look very classical because it will have ‘passed through a romantic period’ (CW, p. 65). Hulme’s late ‘philosophy’, then, is a classification of desires, tidying them up conceptually so that they know their place. It is only thus, presumably, that he can make sense of the fact that he has been capable of irreconcilable impulses. Insofar as those impulses have found expression as ideas, he had, during his short writing life, allowed them expression as occasion demanded, hence his ‘contradictions’ – notoriously between his Bergsonism and his anti-romanticism – so that even in some of his earliest writings there are apparently anomalous intrusions of ideas that will later become central preoccupations. When he first set out, however, he was more ready to let contradictions meet, and it was thus that they became fruitful. In his desire for clear, absolute distinctions in the late ‘Notebook’, Hulme disparages ‘region 2’ (the one to which he is now confining his Bergsonism) as a ‘muddy mixed zone’, while his other two regions exhibit geometrical perfection. The middle zone is ‘covered with some confused muddy substance’ (CW, p. 425). ‘Mechanism’ is no longer a ‘nightmare’ for Hulme – it was never his chief nightmare – and he no longer accepts the claims of Bergson to lift life and ‘matter’ into the realms of spirit. The image of ‘mud’ that Hulme uses here is of great significance – if we begin to read him in a literary rather than philosophical way. For it takes us back to the early notebooks and papers published as ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’, from which Bergson is absent.4 Mud, along with ashes, there stands for the undifferentiated substance into which all phenomena can be resolved. Bergsonism thus begins to appear to be a huge detour in the development of Hulme’s ‘search for reality’, as he finally moves towards assuaging his fears through a resort to entirely traditional belief systems and religious practices (using, as an amateur, whatever philosophical ideas are expedient in justifying this to himself). The claims of Bergson to assuage his fears by electrifying the muddy region 2 with élan vital no longer appeal to the Hulme of ‘A Notebook’. To say that Hulme did not succeed in solving his problems through a coherent and original philosophy is simply to confirm that he is not a great philosopher (no one has claimed this status for him, however), not to deny the reality of the problems. It is always possible, of course, that had he survived the First World War

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he would have produced a convincing philosophical solution to the problems, but failing this, we need to return to the melting pot of his speculative industry, where literary reading is required to supplement philosophical sorting. For Hulme, imagery was primary, not simply illustrative of arguments. Hence his Johnsonian criterion, ‘What would . . . a carter in the Leek road think of it all?’ (CW, p. 8). By approaching him through imagery we can see that the chief nightmare for Hulme appeared not to be mechanism but isolation in a universe that has no inherent characteristics or human qualities. This universe is figured in the early notes as cinders or mud. ‘Cinders’ appears to be his preferred image because it carries the suggestion of separation and discontinuity, whereas mud (though equally intractable and a more traditional image for an ur-substance) suggests homogeneity without discontinuity. (The image also carries other connotations to which I shall return.) Hulme’s original conception of language appeared to be more Nietzschean than Bergsonian. Language, a web of communication between people with desires and purposes in common, constructs pathways among the cinders, and these socially constructed conveniences are taken to be reality, whereas they are simply short cuts that get mapped in culture. Because language is common, and because the evolutionary goals of human beings and other life forms remain constant, Hulme believes he has escaped the charge of total relativism that Protagoras’ principle of ‘man the measure of all things’ implies (CW, p. 8). Whether this is justified or not, the important thing is the communal basis of this construction of an expedient reality through language: ‘Through all the ages, the conversation of ten men sitting together is what holds the world together’ (CW, p. 14). Hulme was, as I have mentioned, characterized by Ezra Pound as ‘the Pickwickian Englishman who starts a club’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 58). Robert Ferguson reprints Hulme’s ‘Rules 1908’, which formed the constitution of the ‘Poets’ Club’: twelve rules that, from the first (‘The Club shall be called the “Poets’ Club,” and shall consist of not more than fifty members’), to the last (prescribing the method of electing new members), with, in between, details of the officers and titles, place and times of meeting, procedures at dinners, price of dinners eaten and dinners missed, length of papers to be discussed and protocols for contributions from the floor, number of guests to be invited, in one short page conjures up from a chance shared interest the picture of a stable, well-ordered society ready to deal with any contingency, housed in its own comfortable premises ‘above Rumpelmeyer’s’ in St James Street, London. The document is a microcosm of Hulme’s conception of the construction of reality – and reading it we cannot help (probably wrongly) inferring the existence of a well-disciplined and carefully structured reality, an efficient going concern. The tone of ‘Cinders’ is frequently disparaging of such inferences insofar as they are applied macrocosmically, and Hulme is often insistent on the need to set aside the ‘disease’ of language that overlays the cinderheaps and substitutes itself for them. But it is essential to realize that, however skeptical he was about its ultimate foundations, the club was essential for him: indeed it was essential because of his skepticism and the underlying fear of isolation in an ocean of ashes. ‘Living language is a house’, he decides (CW, p. 33), and ‘the bad is fundamental,

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and . . . the good is artificially built up in it and out of it, like oases in the desert, or as cheerful houses in the storm’ (CW, p. 10). When he writes, in one of the fragments that Alun R. Jones collected under the title ‘Images’, ‘Old Houses were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling’ (Jones, 1960, p. 180) it is not difficult to guess the reaction of the ‘carter in the Leek Road’. Whether he thought it worth bothering with or not, he would take it as a simple statement of fact. I do not wish to dissolve the fact into allegory, even while I wish to insist on certain resonances to the lines. Only with some knowledge of Hulme’s thought could any metaphysical implication be definitely assigned to the image, which can be unfolded without reference to it. First, we have here a contrast between what is solid (and reliable) now – the old houses that we imagine standing four-square and enduring – and its earlier non-existence except as space enclosed by scaffolding. Emotions cluster round this contrast. Second, we have an image of the workmen, co-operating in the erection of the wooden scaffolding, perhaps climbing to a dangerous height while they build up the house inside, and insouciantly whistling while they do so. The security of the old house contrasts with its precarious process of construction out of (it would seem) nothing. The juxtaposition of the images is as important as the images themselves, though this textbook characteristic of imagism is not something I am particularly concerned with at present, since I am here interested in Hulme’s positive presentation of the construction of a dwelling for us amidst the cinders. Such a dwelling has more needs to fulfil than purely utilitarian ones. We have seen that for Hulme the instinct for belief in the deity is part of humankind’s fixed nature. In ‘Notes on Language and Style’, a view of the dome of Brompton Oratory apparently floating in the mist suggests to him the process by which the construction of reality through language also goes beyond the utilitarian human dwelling so that it encompasses a location for the deity: ‘And the words moved until they became a dome, a solid, separate world, a dome in the mist, a thing of terror beyond us, and not of us. Definite heaven above worshippers, incense hides foundations. A definite force majeure (all the foundations of the scaffolding are in us, but we want an illusion, falsifying us, something independent of foundations)’ (CW, pp. 27-8). We have here again the image of scaffolding, rooted in nothing but ourselves and when dismantled leaving the overarching dome apparently a thingin-itself, independent enough of its constructors to cause them ‘terror’. The stage of making this dwelling ‘other’, of removing the scaffolding, Hulme associates with ‘art’: ‘the mist effect, the transformation in words, has the art of pushing it through the door’ (CW, p. 28). The ‘door’ would seem to be the way into another world, the ‘imaginary land which all of us carry about in desert moments’; art gives ‘a sense of wonder, a sense of being united in another mystic world’ (CW, p. 34). This branch of the argument is already beginning to generate its own reversed reflection, however, to which it will be necessary to return. The dome we have built is the heaven above the worshippers, and it inspires terror. This, as we know, is going to be a real terror for Hulme, but the terror is going to be more fundamental than the attribution of its origin, for the vault of heaven at this early stage of his thought can simply be resolved into a misprision of one of the tracks

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left in the cinders by the networks of language, a product of the constitution of the club. Hulme’s emphasis on the power of language to construct a ‘dwelling’ for us calls to mind Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in which Heidegger reaches back to what he calls the ‘primal nature of these meanings’ (Heidegger, 1975, p. 148), which are available through the etymology of German words but are silenced in the everyday traffic of language as verbal counters. Similarities there certainly are, particularly in the shared view of language as carrying meanings that have declined into latency, and Hulme’s appeal to the carter in the Leek Road may superficially bear comparison with Heidegger’s touchstone of the peasant farmhouse in the Black Forest. The difference is that for Heidegger the Earth is our home, and insofar as the true nature of our dwelling on it is revealed by language, it is so revealed, not constructed.5 Hulme, on the other hand, lives in the world of as-if. For Hulme there is something heroic in the achievement of raising oneself so one floats above the chaos of cinders. It happens by moments, and the role of art is to prolong them: ‘the musical note, perhaps Art’ (CW, p. 9). Hulme’s love for military music and street bands is reflected in several of his notes: ‘thank God for the long note of the bugle, which moves the world bodily out of the cinders and the mud’ (CW, p. 18). Parallel to his remark about the carter in the Leek road, and showing a similar down-to-earth approach, Hulme instances boys going home from the music hall whistling a tune they have heard there as a paradigm of the relation between poet and reader (CW, p. 39).6 A further street image he returns to frequently is that of attractive women and their clothes as they walk: ‘A girl’s balldress and shoes are symbolic of the world organised (in counters) from the mud’ (CW, p. 12). Style, particularly their dress, removes them into the ‘other world’ (CW, p. 36): ‘The air of absolute detachment, of being things in themselves. Objects of beauty with the qualification at the basis of it. Disinterestedness, as though saying: We may have evolved painfully from the clay, and be the last leaf on a tree. But now we have cut ourselves away from that. We are things-inthemselves. We exist out of time’ (CW, p. 28). The analogy flows directly into Hulme’s conception of the ‘staged’ nature of literature, in which ideals ‘must wear high heeled shoes which make them appear free movers, and not sprung from that low thing earth’ (CW, p. 30).7 It is noticeable that these ideas and images do not clearly separate the realm of the aesthetic from the realm of everyday reality. The communal imposition of the trackways of language over the mud or cinders builds up the world we perceive; when this is done with enough flourish and conviction (and when a permanent or shared impulse in humanity becomes fixed and recognized as a result of this), we leave contact with mud and cinders and enter a floating world above it. But the processes appear to be the same: the girl’s dress and shoes are (like ordinary language) counters, but they lift her out of the mud and cinders as an example of art. Pursuing Hulme’s train of thought in this direction (reserving, still, a consciousness that it is by no means the only direction it takes), we can note that the result of such uplifted moments is ‘ecstasy’, a word that appears frequently in

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the early notes. It is momentary and vulnerable, and is achieved when consciousness of the cindery chaos is suppressed: ‘Happiness and ecstasy at present unstable. Walking in the street, seeing pretty girls (all chaos put into the drains: not seen)’ (CW, p. 13). The poet expresses ‘wonder and ecstasy’ (CW, p. 24), and the ‘whole essence of poetry’ for Hulme is the ability to prolong – as in ‘the long note of the bugle’ (CW, p. 18) – such moments: ‘The art of dwelling on, drunken ecstasy on one point’ (CW, p. 37). Apart from the hint of terror in the passage on Brompton Oratory, these citations have all revealed a spirit of contentment in the condition of existence in the man-made world of linguistic artifice, above the cinders and the mud, though there have also been hints of its precariousness. Examining Hulme’s acknowledged poem ‘The Embankment’ we can see a sardonic recognition of this precariousness in the image of the ‘fallen gentleman’, once no doubt a member of a club, now down and out.8 It is almost astonishing how the first two lines of this poem draw together the predominant images for the world of artifice Hulme has celebrated in ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’: ‘Once, in a finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy/ In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement’ (CW, p. 3). As with the case of the old houses, it is the sheer literalism of the imagination at work here that seems so startling after we have seen Hulme working through these same images as analogies to clarify his thought in his speculative notes. Here if anywhere William Carlos Williams’s apparently fatuous slogan, ‘No ideas but in things’, takes on credibility, for the images create the thought without allegory. In due course we shall also need to relate this achievement to Hulme’s well-known opposition to abstraction in language. The ‘system’ or direction of thought I have been tracing leaves experienced reality contingent on a community of impulses and instincts developed for evolutionary ends of the particular species, man. Hulme does not attempt a philosophical solution to the problem of the initial differentiation of a form of life from the chaos of cinders, and in the context of the poems and notes this deficiency need not concern us.9 But he does take seriously the contingency of phenomena on impulses that have (being evolutionary) a grounding in the body itself. And in this he again seems to be closer to Nietzsche (who is frequently concerned with ideas as the correlative of the healthy or the sickly body) than he is to Bergson: ‘all peculiarities of the human organism must have their counterpart in the construction of the world’ (CW, p. 13); this idea he classifies as ‘mystical’. It is perhaps a mystical point of view because it leads to consequences Hulme does not wish to test, a kind of ultimate humanism that suggests too harmonious an image of the universe. Philosophically he will not accept this: ‘The absolute is invented to reconcile conflicting purposes. But these purposes are necessarily conflicting, even in the nature of Truth itself. It is so absurd to construct an absolute which shall at each moment just manage by artificial gymnastics to reconcile these purposes’ (CW, p. 13). Philosophically, this is a critique (or repudiation) of F. H. Bradley, and it carries implications about the coherence of the idea of the ‘human’ that are reflected in Hulme’s later anti-humanism and in his separation of ‘regions’ in ‘A

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Notebook’. He recognizes these consequences when he states that ‘Man is a weathercock, standing in the middle’ (CW, p. 19). But if we re-invert the idea here, grounding it again in the physical, the reference to gymnastics connects it to the frequent images of dance in the early notes (these images find their way less directly into the poems). Dance, as a physical expression related to the body’s fundamental impulses, is the ultimate example of the reality that floats above the cinders: ‘Dancing to express the organisation of cinders, finally emancipated (cf. bird)’ (CW, p. 17). The mystical idea of the congruence of the human organism and the macrocosm, and the belief in the possibility of a total expression through the (dancing) body is associated with Hulme’s cryptic mentions of the ‘red dancer’, the embodiment of his idea of metaphysical expression: ‘the red moving figure is a way of grouping some ideas together, just as powerful a means as the one called logic’ (CW, pp. 34-5). It is the image of the ‘cosmic dance’ (CW, pp. 34-5) associated with the idea of total identity of the human and its reality. It is the epitome of what Frank Kermode called the ‘romantic image’, instanced in the 1890s’ fad for Loïe Fuller, later for Isadora Duncan and frequently appearing in the imagery of pre-modernist and modernist works of art and poems.10 The position thus far retrieved from these writings is well-summarized in William Empson’s lines from ‘This Last Pain’: ‘All those large dreams by which men long live well / Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell’, and his invitation to ‘build an edifice of form / for house where phantoms may keep warm’. Outside the house, Hulme believes, all is cinders and primeval cold (CW, p. 11). He entertains the Empsonian notion of cultivating illusion as a means of sustaining comfort and happiness: ‘A judicious choice of illusions, leading to activities planned and carried out, is the only means of happiness, e.g. the exhilaration of regarding life as a procession or a war’ (CW, p. 16). Our Bergsonian idea of Hulme (an accurate enough view in its way), leads to an emphasis on his dissatisfaction with this ‘counter world’ of artifice that removes us from the more fundamental ‘cinders’ of reality. In his Bergsonian phase Hulme applied Bergson’s critique of the intellect and its mode of understanding to his own division of the world into cinders and counters. For Bergson the world of counters and the intellect is a limited world, governed by the laws of physics and matter. This is the world, not of vitality and life, but of mechanism and death. By an act of intuition and concentration, however, it is possible to get behind this world to a more fundamental, uncircumscribed region of life and creativity which the intellect normally solidifies and maps onto the phenomenal world in which we normally live. The theory is now familiar in the feminist versions of it that derive from Lacan. The disparity is obvious: for Bergson the pre-intellectual or pre-linguistic world is one of life and creativity, but for Hulme it is a place of ashes and death: ‘Death is a breaking down into cinders’ (CW, p. 9), while the counter world of language (at least in the material we have been considering) is a place of exhilaration, excitement and happiness. It is not difficult to see how Bergson’s conception of a phenomenal dualism in which an ur-substance is overlaid by a sign-system that usurps it would be seized on by Hulme as equivalent to his own dualism, but it is essential to realize that the values attaching to the poles of

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Bergson’s duality are almost exactly the reverse of those of Hulme. This, I suggest, is what Hulme himself begins to realize in his image of the Bergsonian ‘region 2’ of ‘A Notebook’ as ‘confused muddy substance’ (CW, p. 425). But throughout ‘Cinders’ Hulme does disparage the pretensions (and complacencies) of the counter world in the face of the cinders it spans, and this attitude certainly has a Bergsonian equivalent that in his formal writings he is prepared to exploit. It leads to a quite different idea of the nature of ‘art’ from the one so far proposed. So, as expounded in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, instead of being a phenomenon of the counter world, art is ‘a more direct communication of reality’ – reality being for Bergson the ‘flux of interpenetrated elements unseizable by the intellect’ (CW, p. 193). Art in this theory is not a construction but the demolition of a construction that has become an obstruction. Were it not for the barrier of the counter world we have made (the extensive manifold) we would be in direct contact with reality, and ‘art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists’ (CW, p. 198). In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, apparently written around the same time (1911), Hulme has entirely gone over to this view of art, which he now dissociates from the counter world; poetry ‘is a compromise for a language of intuition that would hand over sensations bodily’ (CW, p. 70). No doubt it is possible by careful teasing out of arguments (by what Hulme calls ‘artificial gymnastics’) to mediate between these views about art, but it is not necessary. Hulme needed them both at (more or less) the same time. Psychologically what is at the root of both is a desire to make vivid, to avoid the merely habitual and the settled grooves of customary perception. The point that is most important to note, however, is that for Bergson the revelation of reality would show it as embodying the values of life, creativity and freedom, while in Hulme’s Bergsonian version of art what would be revealed is terrifyingly inhospitable to humanity. Hulme’s Bergsonian artist is expelled, or has withdrawn, from the world of human associations, as is made clear in the poem ‘Madman’, where the frightened speaker sees past the social world of ‘those who have not yet withdrawn’ and is overcome by ‘cold’ (Jones, 1960, p. 170). It is well-known that the naturalistic image for the primordial substance that exceeds the mapping powers of human language was, for Hulme, ‘the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of Western Canada’ (CW, p. 53); the ‘flats of Canada are incomprehensible on any single theory’ (CW, pp. 10-11). His rough pre-Bergsonian metaphysics, though identifying ‘cinders’ as a primordial substance, also recognizes that the feeling it induced in him must correspond with some human impulse or instinct (though he does not go as far as Nietzsche in speculating what the evolutionary function of thoughts and feelings that harm us might be). To put the matter in a paradoxical and circular formulation, the notion of ‘cinders’ and alienation from the human are themselves the product of the human superstructure over the cinders. The division, the fundamental fissure is in humanity itself, recognized in Hulme’s noting ‘The two moods in life’, one of which is the ‘withdrawn into oneself mood’ of ‘ennui, sickness and disgust’ that is ‘the fundamental ennui and chaos out of which the world has been built’; while the other is the ecstasy and happiness of those moments of exaltation already

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discussed. ‘Man is the chaos highly organised, but liable to revert to chaos at any moment. Happiness and ecstasy at present unstable’ (CW, p. 13), and, later on the same page, ‘The sick disgusting moments are part of the fundamental cinders – primeval chaos.’ What Hulme objects to is the complacency that restricts humanity to the second of these moods. One of his images for this comfortable insulation is the railway line: ‘a railway leaves out all the gaps of dirt between’, he complains (CW, p. 14), and it is clearly his ambition to give a more accurate feel of the ‘dirt’ or cinders between: ‘Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose – a train which delivers you at a destination’ (CW, p. 70). Hence the frequency in the early notes of the stress on conveying in as tactile a way as possible the gritty, cindery reality that the passenger normally ignores. Most walks that Hulme mentions are cold, however. It is, as well, the explanation for his frequently expressed desire for the language of poetry to be made of ‘clay’: it is seeing the real clay, that men in agony worked with, that gives pleasure (CW, p. 26). Here is where Hulme’s dislike of abstract language originates. The two impulses corresponding to these moods, to transcend, and to return to the muddy earth, generally alternate in Hulme’s verse as a pattern of hubris receiving its comeuppance. He may express the emotional emptiness and anomie this leaves in its wake, or, more stoically, stand aside and smile knowingly. Hulme’s highest claims for the counter world built up so that it becomes a floating world projected from humanity are high indeed, extending, as we have seen in the example he extrapolates from the dome of Brompton, to the vault of Heaven itself. But these vaunting images always, in the end, disappoint and the tracks lead into the cold and cinders. One of the examples he puts forward in his description of a strategy of attaining ‘happiness’ – for him apparently, as for Swift, the capacity for being well-deceived – is ‘the exhilaration of regarding life as a procession or a war’ (CW, p. 16), and the music that seems to have achieved this exhilaration for him was less a ‘finesse of fiddles’ than the military bugle call or the marching band. He records his joy in Bologna when a military band marches past: ‘I regard processions as the highest form of art’, and tells how he missed the opening of the philosophical congress in order to watch it (CW, p. 108). The other side of the coin is given in ‘In the City Square’, which begins with the triumphal image of the ‘start of the great march/ The cries, the cheers, the parting/ Marching in an order/ Through the familiar streets’ but continues into disillusion as the march proceeds ‘alone’ out onto the moonlit moor, with torches extinguished. It concludes in the cold with a vision of the warrior dead, calling into question the destination of the route (Jones, 1960, p. 169). The poem may be compared with A. E. Housman’s ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’, which also treats of marching soldiers going towards death. The Housman poem does not come out well from the comparison; in particular, its final triumphant line asserting redemption of the dead strikes a false, forced note. In ‘Cinders’, following his mention of a dancer expressing an organization of cinders, ‘finally emancipated’ (CW, p. 17), Hulme notes the transitory nature of such achievements: if they comprise a track, like the route of the marchers they can be disrupted, peter out or lead simply into the questionable cold:

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All these sudden insights (e.g. the great analogy of a woman compared to the world in Brussels) – all of these start a line, which seems about to unite the whole world logically. But the line stops. There is no unity. All logic and life are made up of tangled ends like that. Always think of the fringe and of the cold walks, of the lines that lead nowhere. (CW, p. 17)

When the dancer appears in Hulme’s poetry it is as an anthropomorphized version of the sky (hence the world), seducing the poet into one of those moments of apparent insight that he both loves but knows will disappoint or merely distract. Particularly she is the sunset in three of his poems: the acknowledged ‘City Sunset’, ‘The Sunset’ and ‘Sunset (II)’. In ‘Town Sky-Line’ she is ‘Flora’, but in all the poems her flirtatious behavior is in the brave vibration of her dress, the clouds. As Hulme said, the real level-headedness is ‘not to be intoxicated with clothes’, and this resistance is intimated in the three sunset poems. In ‘Sunset (II)’, a mildly misogynistic characterization of the sunset as flaunting ‘like a scarlet sore’ and expecting admiration of its beauty ‘like a wanton’ is contrasted with a preferred workingman’s sunset returning ‘at eve/ After labour’ (Jones, 1960, p. 177).11 In ‘A City Sunset’ the alluring fancy is entertained with less resistance, but she is finally dismissed as ‘a vain maid, lingering, loth to go’ (Jones, 1960, p. 155). In ‘The Sunset’, the most poised, impersonal but mannered of these poems, her identity as a dancer is made explicit, since she is ‘A coryphée, covetous of applause’ (Jones, 1960, p. 174).12 She asks too much for herself and is ‘loth to leave the stage’; hence the ‘hostile murmurs of the stalls’, where, presumably, Hulme is sitting, as usual attempting to disrupt the performance.13 The wistful acknowledgement of the partiality of all those experiences that redeem the world from cinders occurs in the beautiful final paragraphs of ‘Cinders’, collecting together many of the images that have preoccupied him: The road leading over the prairie, at dusk, with the half-breed. Travel helps one to discover the undiscovered portions of one’s own mind. Scenes like the red dance leap to the centre of the mind there to synthesize what before was perhaps unknown. Must see these different manifestations of the cinders; otherwise we cannot work the extended clay. A melancholy spirit, the mind like the great desert lifeless, and the sound of march music in the street, passes like a wave over the desert, unifies it, but then goes. (CW, p. 22)

I have laid some emphasis on Hulme’s ‘clubbish’ tendencies; but he was also inclined to disrupt those clubs of which he was a member. Clubs foster just that complacency that disgusts him. In his 1908 lecture on modern poetry to the Poets’ Club, far from observing the decorum apparently encouraged by the formality of the rules he laid down, he begins with what is virtually an insult to the president of the club by baldly asserting an unqualified rejection of the president’s view of poetry. In a later essay he records how his faith in Bergson’s philosophy was rocked by attending a lecture given by the great philosopher and finding himself

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surrounded by a hall full of like-minded disciples: ‘What these people agreed on could not be right’ – this is not a club of which he wishes to be a member (CW, p. 156). At Cambridge Hulme had been president of the ‘Discord Club’, and it was probably only in a club with such an oxymoronic title that he could have felt happy. Its activities, as recorded by Ferguson, went beyond undergraduate high jinks and drunken horseplay. The deliberate, and apparently sober, outrages it (or Hulme in particular) committed against convention, decorum, law and property amount to an extraordinary anarchist gesture against the complacencies of the rulebound order – the network of codes – that constituted Edwardian bourgeois society.14 His later gestures are quieter (though intermittently outrageous), as he finds his place in that society. Nevertheless: In the quiet land There is a secret unknown fire. Suddenly rocks shall melt And the old roads mislead. Across the familiar road There is a deep cleft. I must stand and draw back. In the cool land There is a secret fire. (Jones, 1960, p. 166)

The image of the disrupted track is familiar from the early notebooks, but that of the volcanic threat beneath is not. As always we need to recall Hulme’s working premise that all that is ‘perceived’ outside is a projection answering to what is first an impulse from within the person: the ‘familiar road’ is not just Edwardian England but Hulme himself. The new image of volcanic fire contrasts sharply with the cold cinders that he usually imagines as the bedrock for his trackways, and it draws our attention to the anomaly of his choice of cinders as an image for the primordial. For of course cinders cannot be primordial since they are what remain from a prior conflagration or volcanic eruption, but Hulme normally shows no consciousness of this. Despite the tendency to philosophical idealism (an evolutionary version of idealism) in Hulme’s early thought, there is also, as here, a suppressed sense of something prior and inaccessible, beyond the phenomenal horizon. This prior ‘something’ has its place in Hulme’s thought as the correlate of the instinct to believe in the existence of deity. The deity is like some version of the romantic sublime in being beyond signification, but insofar as it has characteristics it partakes of the same doubleness we have found in Hulme’s experience of the world as cold, alienating cinders and as redeemed, if only at moments and precarious points, from that. This does not develop into a full-scale Manichaeism, but there is a hint of a Gnostic belief in a hostile as well as a beneficent deity. The realm of deity is the vault of heaven and stars. In ‘The Embankment’ the speaker, exiled from the warmth of the human club, calls on God to ‘make small/ The old star-eaten blanket of the sky/that I may fold it round me and in comfort lie’ (Jones, 1960, p. 159). From the manuscript notes Jones publishes, the connection with the

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‘flats of Canada’ and the cindery chill they imparted is evident: the gods are the ‘blanket makers in the prairie of cold’. The manuscript indicates at least some skepticism on Hulme’s part, not perhaps about the existence of deity, but about the reality of the comfort it offers: ‘Religion is the expansive lie of temporary warmth’ (Jones, 1960, p. 159). It goes without saying that God will not turn the sky into a moth-eaten blanket to warm the down-and-out gentleman. The obverse of this image of the gods providing comfort and warmth to those exposed on the cold prairie is seen in the poem ‘At Night!’ This opens with a vision of a dead tree ‘silhouetted on the hill’s edge’ recalling diseased veins on a white corpse.15 The poem concludes: The tearing iron hook Of pitiless Mara. Handling soft clouds in insurrection. Brand of the obscene gods On their flying cattle, Roaming the sky prairie. (Jones, 1960, p. 167)

‘Mara’ is presumably the agent of these inimical and cruel gods, herding their cattle and branding them, taking them to the slaughterhouse where they will be slung on her iron hook. Hulme’s major criticism of romanticism in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is that it reserves to man what should be attributed to deity and installs the idea of progress towards perfectibility in humanity. He uses a theory of repression to explain the appearance of the religious emotions in secular (humanistic) regions. It is, of course (wittingly or not) a criticism of his own rudimentary metaphysic, which is a kind of Berkeleyan idealism in which God has been replaced by an evolving humanity. Gods, if we follow this direction of Hulme’s thought, are, as much as phenomenal reality itself, the projections of instincts (the fright of the mind that created the first gods, or, more beneficently, a simple, permanent instinct to believe in God). The yearning for the infinite that Hulme dislikes in romanticism by this account must take place within the limits of the human, in other words, and this is what Hulme dramatizes in ‘Mana Aboda’, in which the sky – that symbolist site of impossible yearning, instanced in Mallarmé’s ‘L’Azur’ (‘Je suis hanté. L’Azur! l’Azur! l’Azur! l’Azur!’) – becomes a goddess much like the ancient Egyptian Nût, ‘whose bent form the sky in arched circle is’. She is also the ‘woman compared to the world’, an image that had seemed such an insight, apparently, when thought of (in Brussels, Hulme reminds himself). The poem is a comedy of projections and transferences. The romantic poets are there with their roses, but the ‘unknown grief’ is that of the goddess. The romantic ideal of union with the infinite is, as always, unconsummated, but the attempts of the poets are belittled by comparison with the despair of the goddess: ‘I weary of the roses and the singing poets –/ Josephs all, not tall enough to try’ (Jones, 1960, p. 157). Joseph, of course, was not the father of Jesus Christ; it took union with the more than human before redemption could enter the universe. Poetry is subtly and

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humorously put in a less exalted place than religion, but romantic concerns are still recognized, and, as I have suggested, the idea that the whole drama actually takes place within the limits of human imagination is by no means ruled out. The poem has a narrator who tells us that Mana Aboda, the goddess, ‘seems’ to mourn for an unknown grief, and it is only by his report (‘I heard her cry’) that we are let into the secret of her supposed weariness. Hulme is not very successful in making a clear-cut distinction between romanticism and classicism (but then who is?). His own themes belong to the afterlife of romanticism. Michael Roberts shrewdly noted that his poetry does ‘drag in the infinite’ (and we have seen that religion seems to get spilt into it as well). He adds that: ‘In all Hulme’s poems, the ‘infinite’ things – beauty, sky, moon and sea – appear, but where a Romantic poet would try to make familiar things seem important by comparing them with moon or sea, Hulme reverses the effect and makes the infinite things seem small and homely by comparing them with a red-faced farmer, or a child’s balloon, or a boy going past the churchyard’ (1982, p. 228). The boundary between romanticism and modernism is no easier to fix than that between romanticism and classicism, but the big difference is that the transition to modernism was willed, even while a romantic Weltanschauung, in Hulme’s word, still lingered on the stage, loath to go. The model available to Hulme and his generation for extricating culture from that was the dandified sardonic aestheticism of the 1890s. Hulme claims for his rejection of romanticism (and for his ‘classicism’) that with it ‘you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish’ (CW, p. 63). It does not sound far away from the method of the aesthetic movement. T. S. Eliot was heavily indebted to the dandified symbolisme of Jules Laforgue, and treated the stock romantic props with heavy irony: ‘The moon has lost her memory/A washed out smallpox cracks her face’ (Eliot, 1990, p. 27). It is not surprising that he should have admired Hulme’s poems so much, for Hulme’s image of the moon leaning over a hedge ‘like a red-face farmer’ performs the same deflation without Eliot’s lingering aura of ‘decadence’. Again, Hulme’s poem ‘The Embankment’ is not so far removed from Wilde’s epigrammatic ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’, and its ‘fallen gentleman’ is an archetypal relic of that era; but how different is the spirit of the poem from anything that had gone before. Hulme learnt a style from despair and taught poetry how to be modern. The tradition of poetry most often identified as having learned from Hulme how to be modern leads from the Imagism of Pound (with offshoots blossoming and shedding petals into a Chinese jar), through William Carlos Williams, to culminate at Black Mountain in the poetics of the ‘archaeologist of morning’, Charles Olson. That tradition acted as if the cure for the ‘language disease’ – the tendency of the ready-made to deliver its meanings without friction and thus without effect – must be a return to the primal. The ‘primal’, conveyed somehow directly, is the ‘thing’ with its effect, rather than mere meaning. There is indeed

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warrant in Hulme for regarding an unmediated transfer of experience as the real objective of poetry, which at one point he says is ‘a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily’ (CW, p. 70); the body feels effects, not meanings. For Hulme, syntax and the ‘connections in language’ are mere secondary refinements that ‘only indicate the precise relation or attitude or politeness between two simultaneously presented images’ (CW, p. 29). The tradition that derives from such an approach strives like Antaeus to return to primal ground as the source of power. Contributors to that tradition may take the ‘primal’ to be the human sensorium, or its correlate, human language traced down to where its roots draw direct nourishment from the earth, before it branches into an airy interlacement of syntax, or they may see it as an original occulted location for the human in nature, traceable in myth or other inscriptions of pre-history.16 But it is far from certain that in this primal dissolution of the human superstructure our best selves, or even our best poems, are to be found. Hulme has been too readily identified with this tradition, however (notably by Donald Davie in his sceptical corrective to it, Articulate Energy), as the present reading of his early work has, I hope, shown.17 For if he values Antaeus, he also values Antaeus’ antagonist, the heroic Hercules who lifts him above the cindery Earth into the airy other world of spirit.18 Hulme’s best poems turn their struggle into an evenly-balanced ju-jitsu or an elegant, wistful pas-de-deux.

Notes 1

See ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’ (CW, p. 172). The famous epigraph of ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ in Speculations, ‘The fright of the mind before the unknown created not only the first gods, but also the first art’ (p. 73), frankly acknowledges a psychological – and hence natural – origin to the supposedly transcendent region 3. Since the Csengeri text of this lecture, in the absence of the original manuscript, follows the Speculations printing, it is not clear why the epigraph is omitted in the Collected Writings printing. When Hulme wrote ‘A Notebook’ he had become convinced that the arguments of Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl had secured the objective status of region 3. 3 Interestingly, in the same ‘note’ he predicts but denounces the position he will arrive at in ‘A Notebook’: ‘this combination of a belief in mechanism and a belief in absolute values . . . is just irritating sloppiness’ (CW, p. 153); in ‘A Notebook’ he tries to avoid this sloppiness by asserting that the two beliefs have no connection with each other. 4 Karen Csengeri dates ‘Cinders’ to 1906–7 but says that Hulme ‘added [to] it in the years following’ (CW, p. 7); ‘Notes on Language and Style’ she dates to c. 1907. Hulme began reading Bergson in 1907. For a rewarding account of ‘Cinders’ as a precursor of modernist and postmodernist disruptions of logos, see Dennis Brown, ‘T. E. Hulme’s “Cinders”’, 2003. 5 This is not to say that Heidegger is unconcerned with construction; but his constructions locate us in what is there; Hulme’s lift us out of what is there (cinders), for his ‘primal’ is not hospitable to us. 2

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Compare the workmen whistling as they construct the house, the sea ‘feigning joy’ by whistling, imagined by ‘The Man in the Crow’s Nest’ (Jones, 1960, p. 161), and the resolve of the ‘Madman’ to ‘hum in the presence of God, it will sustain you’ (Jones, 1960, p. 170). 7 It is not for me to defend Hulme’s ogling habits. But it should be noted that he presents these as examples of deliberate display on the part of the women. There is (or at least he believes there is) a contract between him and them, and they are part of the same game, members of the same club, although their roles differ. This is to be contrasted with that variety of ‘male gaze’ he exalts as ‘the real levelheadedness: to be able to analyse a pretty girl at first sight, not to be intoxicated with clothes, to be able to imagine the effect of dipping in water’ (CW , p. 15). 8 It is ‘acknowledged’ in the sense that it is one of the five he consented to have published as his ‘Complete Poetical Works’ in 1912. 9 He makes a brief attempt at exploring the philosophical consequences of this in ‘Cinders’, concluding that man and man’s world were ‘gradually built up at the same time’ (CW, p. 12). By positing a prior ‘life-force’, Bergson gave his own solution to the problem. 10 See Frank Kermode, ‘Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev’, 1971. 11 A draft of this poem (Jones, 1960, pp. 178–9) contains the lines ‘Along the fretted edge of the city’s roofs/ About the time of homeward going crowds’, which reappear in the ‘acknowledged’ ‘A City Sunset’. Presumably the finished ‘Sunset (II)’ was produced after the draft was pillaged. 12 A coryphée is a ballet dancer who ranks above a member of the corps de ballet and below a soloist. 13 Ferguson records that in 1904 Hulme appeared before a magistrate after his disorderly conduct in and outside the Empire Music Hall. He denied the charge of drunkenness and was fined 5 shillings (p. 28). 14 See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, chapter 2. 15 There is more to be said on Hulme’s feelings about trees, which tend to have an ominous quality (see the passage about ‘a waiting engine in the trees . . . like an animal waiting to kill’ (CW, p. 42)). Hulme needed this threatening sense of reality as a contrast to more ecstatic moments. If life were all ecstasy the conflicts that make up the self would disappear. This is the idea behind ‘Conversion’ (Jones, 1960, p. 160), which sees the speaker overcome by ecstasy at the beauty of ‘the valley wood’. The result (sardonically exaggerated) is stifling. The conversion, presumably, is from a view of trees as diseased and ugly to a more romantic one of their absolute ‘beauty’, a view which would make Hulme’s survival impossible. See Peter Nicholls’s discussion of the modernists’ fear of a ‘narcissistic suppression of otherness’ in Modernisms, 1995, pp. 187–92. It is notable that T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Death of St Narcissus’ is reputed to have originated partly in Eliot’s admiration for Hulme’s poem. 16 For Charles Olson the primal was all of these things (and at a certain point of regression their unity would presumably become apparent). For a typical restorative agenda, see the collection of notes gathered in Olson, Proprioception, 1965. 17 Donald Davie, in Articulate Energy, 1955 (revised in Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy, 1992) is, for the sake of his argument, too ready to identify Hulme entirely with what is only one side of his double-sided conception of poetry. 18 ‘Allegorically, the subject [of Hercules overcoming Antaeus] can be interpreted . . . on a Neo-Platonic plane as spirit overcoming flesh’ (Boorsch, 1992, p. 298).

Chapter 2

A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language Andrew Thacker

Cambridge Connections Early in 1912 T. E. Hulme, sent down from Cambridge eight years earlier for a range of public and private misdemeanours, applied to his old college, St John’s, for reinstatement as an undergraduate.1 As part of this application he used a letter of recommendation from Henri Bergson, whom he had met, for the second time, at an international congress of philosophy the previous year in Bologna.2 Hulme had attended as a member of the Aristotelian Society, to which he had been elected in June 1910. The Aristotelian Society was a key institution in academic philosophy in Britain in the first part of the century. Its chairman was G. E. Moore, an influence upon the Bloomsbury group, but also a key figure in the subsequent development of British philosophy away from continental figures such as Bergson and towards logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. Another pivotal anti-Bergsonian, Bertrand Russell, became President of the Aristotelian Society in 1911. Writing in 1956, Moore had no recollection of Hulme, and perhaps it was Hulme’s interest in Bergson that caused Moore to eradicate this member from his memory bank; in later years Russell did remember Hulme, if only to call him ‘an evil man who could have created nothing but evil’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 1). During 1911 and 1912 Hulme seems to have been preoccupied with philosophy, mainly with Bergson, more perhaps than at any other time in his life. For example, from October 1911 to February 1912 he published a series of ‘Notes on Bergson’ in the New Age and ‘A Personal Impression of Bergson’ in the Westminster Gazette (November 1911); gave a series of lectures in London in November and December 1911 that were published as ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’; and in the same period probably composed the important essay, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’. It was a good moment to be an English Bergsonian, as the French philosopher visited England in 1911 and gave immensely popular lectures in Oxford, Birmingham and London that became regarded, according to Mary Ann Gillies, as ‘social events as well as intellectual exchanges’ (Gillies, 2003, p. 97). As Russell grumbled in a letter from October of

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1911, Bergson’s lectures ‘are reported in the daily newspapers – all England has gone made about him for some reason’ (1992, p. 386). Readmitted to Cambridge in April 1912, Hulme seems to have entered into the philosophical life of the university with gusto, publicizing his own interest in Bergson widely. He had already given a paper on ‘Anti-romanticism and Original Sin’ to the Heretics Club on 25 February 1912 and, on the next day, a paper on Bergson to the female students of Girton College. At this time Hulme was working, along with F. S. Flint, upon a translation of Bergson, which was to become An Introduction to Metaphysics (1913). That this was not popular in certain philosophical circles within Cambridge is indicated by a tirade in The Cambridge Magazine by H. M. Lloyd, a fellow member of St John’s College: ‘I was somewhat scandalised to learn that the name of this college is to be associated . . . with the translation into English of writings which surely cannot add to its reputation wherever sound philosophy is held in esteem’ (1912, p. 296). Hulme’s preface to An Introduction to Metaphysics did indeed list his address as St John’s College, Cambridge; the progress of ‘sound philosophy’, of the analytical ordinary language school associated with Moore and Russell, seemed not to have been unduly held back. However, the presence of another supporter of Bergson, albeit a philosophic amateur as Hulme styled himself, might just have been one of the motivations of Russell’s famous demolition of Bergson’s philosophy as ‘irrational’ in a paper read to The Heretics Club in Trinity College, on 11 March 1912.3 That Russell’s lecture in the Heretics series closely followed that of Hulme, the known Bergsonian, cannot, surely, have been a coincidence. The Heretics was presided over by C. K. Ogden, who had started the Cambridge Magazine in 1912, and with whom Hulme corresponded late in 1911 over the topic of his lecture to the society. After Hulme’s lecture Ogden wrote up an account of the topic for the Cambridge Magazine, and he plugged Hulme’s ‘two forthcoming volumes on Bergson, which we shall await with interest’ (Lloyd, 1912, p. 201).4 Hulme wrote to thank Ogden for the invite, apologizing for being unable to attend the next lecture – Russell on Bergson (Ferguson, 2002, p. 125). It seems that Ogden may well have deliberately followed Hulme with Russell to engender philosophical debate and controversy; watching the philosophic amateur, perhaps complete with knuckleduster, listening to Russell’s disdainful dismissal of Bergson, seems something of a loss all round. We can view Hulme’s final flirtation with Cambridge (he left again under another cloud in November 1912) and the hostility to his interest in Bergson as symptomatic of different currents and tendencies within British thought in the prewar years. Bergson’s influence is often interpreted as being confined to the literary and artistic sphere, influencing writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot and George Bernard Shaw.5 However, Bergson was read and commented upon by a number of key British philosophers in the period; the French philosopher, for example, considerably influenced Russell’s early collaborator A. N. Whitehead.6 Russell certainly took Bergson’s work seriously enough to comment upon it, reading it extensively towards the end of 1911, meeting the French philosopher and having dinner with him in London. When Russell first went to the cinema in 1912 he commented that its sense of reality as a continuous process bore out Bergson’s

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philosophy (1992, p. 422). The basis of Russell’s critique of Bergson was that, although it showed ‘constructive imagination’ (1992, p. 387), it demonstrated little of philosophical method; Bergson’s view of the world was like that of a poet, full of analogies and similes, and profoundly ‘anti-intellectual’.7 As a result, in part, of Russell’s efforts, Bergson dropped off the map of British philosophy after the First World War, to be replaced in the 1920s and 1930s by the cool analytical work of Russell, Logical Positivism and the Vienna Circle.8 But this story is perhaps too neat, and certainly does not capture the complexity of modernist theories of language – both literary and philosophical – in this period, and the role of Bergson’s philosophy in these theories. I want to view Hulme’s writings in the years leading up to 1914, in essays such as ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’, for how their views on language articulate certain important trends and attitudes within modernism. This is not to suggest that Hulme had a developed and rigorous theory of language, but that his attempt to think about the ‘new age’ of modernity involved thinking through the issue of language, a problematic also shared by many contemporary philosophers. Hulme’s writings repeatedly display a keen awareness of the definitional problems involved in discussing modernity. He notes, for example, the trickiness of the terms, ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’, adding that ‘I ought really to have coined a couple of new words’ (CW, pp. 59-60). The opening of ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ refers to the ‘extreme indefiniteness of the vocabulary’ (CW, p. 191) one is obliged to use when discussing art. Many modernists who pursued Pound’s dictum to ‘Make it New’ interpreted the command to mean closer attention to the very material of language: reforming, revising or inventing new linguistic paradigms became crucial to the strategies by which modernism achieved self-definition. In others ways, linking Hulme to the main current of Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century is not as peculiar as it might seem. Karen Csengeri, for instance, hints at the possible intellectual affiliations between Hulme, Russell and Moore in this period, noting Hulme’s awareness of some of Russell’s work on logic and mathematics (1994, p. xxviii). This is demonstrated in the series of articles printed as ‘A Notebook’ in the New Age (1915-16), in which Hulme admits to finding himself, after an initial disagreement, to be in agreement with Moore and Russell over their search for an objective basis for, respectively, ethics and logic (CW, pp. 440-1). Russell’s interest in the logical character of propositions is recognized by Hulme as an attempt to rid logic of any underlying anthropomorphism or humanism: subjects such as ethics and logic are thus, notes Hulme, ‘placed on an entirely objective basis, and do not in the least depend on the human mind’ (CW, p. 443). Although Hulme and Russell later had an intemperate exchange over pacifism and the war in the pages of the Cambridge Magazine, Hulme, with his background in mathematics, seems to have recognized Russell’s attempts to reform language along logical lines as somewhat similar to the dry, hard language of classical verse he had himself espoused.9 Hulme’s view that his aim in writing was ‘accurate, precise and definite description’ is similar in attitude,

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if in nothing else, to Russell’s contemporaneous ‘theory of descriptions’ (Russell, 1918, pp. 99-112). More than Russell, however, the figure that has dominated Anglo-American philosophy of language in the twentieth century is that of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is interesting to note, with one of those coincidental felicities of history, that during Hulme’s return to Cambridge the young Wittgenstein first appeared at the university, to study the philosophy of mathematics with Russell. On 18 October 1911 Russell was having tea with Ogden in Russell’s rooms in Trinity College, when they were interrupted: ‘an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. He turned out to be a man who had learned engineering . . . but during his course had acquired, by himself, a passion for the philosophy of mathematics & has now come to Cambridge on purpose to hear me’ (Monk, 1990, pp. 38-9). Wittgenstein was registered as an undergraduate at Trinity College from February 1912, after studying engineering in Manchester. He not only attended Russell’s lectures on the philosophy of mathematics but, according to Russell’s letters, seemed to hound him, both after his lectures and in his rooms, particularly infuriating Russell with a claim that ‘nothing empirical is knowable’; the frustrated Russell reported to Ottoline Morrell that, ‘I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn’t’ (Monk, 1990, p. 39). However, during the course of the first term in 1912 Russell warmed to Wittgenstein’s passionate attachment to philosophical argument, so much so that by the end of the term he felt that he had taught the young Austrian all he could. Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell of Wittgenstein: ‘I love him and feel he will solve the problems that I am too old to solve – all kinds of vital problems’ (1992, p. 405). Proving that there was not a rhinoceros in the room may have been one such problem. There is no evidence that Hulme and Wittgenstein ever met but it is intriguing to speculate upon whether their paths crossed at Cambridge during the early months of 1912, and what the likely result would be of a meeting between such strong personalities. Wittgenstein would probably not have been interested in attending a lecture on Bergson (who never seems to have been mentioned in his work, even dismissively), but the tortured Austrian intellect may have been attracted by a philosophical discourse upon ‘original sin’. Wittgenstein’s other interest in these months, however, was in psychology, and he conducted experiments upon the role of rhythm in musical appreciation in a laboratory at Cambridge. In these he was helped by the psychologist C. S. Myers, another fascinating intellectual figure in Cambridge at the time, who gave a paper on ‘The New Realism’ in philosophy to the Heretics Club on the night after Hulme’s paper in March 1912. Michael North argues that Myers was significant in transposing an anthropological model onto psychology, and may have influenced Wittgenstein’s later, more ‘anthropological’ philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations.10 When Hulme had returned to Cambridge in 1912 he indicated to his philosophy tutor that he wished to take courses in psychology and mathematics, as well as concentrating upon philosophy. Hulme’s interest in psychology probably derived from Bergson, particularly his theories of the body and the physiological aspects of

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thought. A year later, in October 1913, Hulme attended a congress on aesthetics in Berlin where he heard Myers lecture on ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Origins of Music’, a paper probably deriving from the experiments with Wittgenstein. Hulme wrote to the conference chairman for copies of this, and other papers. Again the overlap with Wittgenstein’s interests is notable. From a background in mathematics both thinkers developed an interest in the form of language and expression, and its reform or clarification, as a means of increasing philosophical communication. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) was the first major statement of his approach to the linguistic problems of modernity. It is a key text for twentieth-century western philosophy, but it is also in many ways, an amazingly modernist piece of writing in style as well as conceptually. In a number of clear and austere paragraphs, logically and sequentially numbered, it aims to show how most philosophical problems occur because ‘the logic of our language is misunderstood’ and that ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence’ (1961, ‘Preface’). Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘picture theory of language’ was designed to clear up these issues with its insistence upon an accurate delimitation of the logical form of all philosophical propositions. Clarity, of course, was the watchword of Imagist aesthetics, forged in the care and attention devoted to words and expression found in Hulme. That Wittgenstein’s theory is visually based (in later years, when he rejected the Tractatus, he said that a ‘picture held us captive’) can again be linked to the emphasis upon visuality in language found in Hulme. To Wittgenstein’s ‘A proposition is a picture of reality’ (1961, 4.01), we can compare Hulme’s claim that poetry is a ‘visual concrete’ language that ‘always endeavours to arrest you, and make you continuously see a physical thing’ (CW, p. 70). Another Cambridge connection between Russell, Wittgenstein and Hulme, and a figure also interested in linguistic reform and psychology, was C. K. Ogden, who as editor of the Cambridge Review had met Hulme on a number of occasions. Hulme’s first book, Speculations, was published posthumously in 1924 in Ogden’s influential and long-lived series of books for Routledge and Kegan Paul, the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. Just two years earlier the same series published the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s first book, and the only one published in his lifetime. Ogden, along with the young F. P. Ramsey, had overseen the English translation.11 Ogden’s role in Cambridge was, as George Wolf notes, as a ‘kind of functional centre of intellectual movements’ (1988, p. 85) in the pre-war years.12 His interests in philosophy, psychology, feminism, politics, literature and linguistics were all reflected in the heterogeneous nature of the work published in the Cambridge Magazine, and in the variety of speakers invited to the Heretics group. In particular it is Ogden’s view of the fundamental importance of language, and its revision, that makes him a modernist comparable to more literary figures such as Hulme. This shared interest in language is shown in Ogden’s comments upon Hulme’s lecture to the Heretics Club: ‘He emphasised the importance of much repetition of certain words – words of power – in the formation of prejudices and ideals, and the general clouding of our judgements . . .

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Dynamic, Vibration, Rhythm . . . were words which he abhorred and on this note of abhorrence the paper came to a close’ (Ogden, 1912, p. 201). From the late 1920s Ogden’s main energies went into the study of ‘words of power’, or more precisely the power of words, shown in his promotion of Basic English, a drastically reduced version of English designed as a lingua franca. The 850 words of Basic (British American Scientific International Commercial) were promoted by Ogden, and later I. A. Richards, as a solution to international conflict and the rising threat of another world war.13 Large numbers of books on Basic were published from Ogden’s Orthological Institute in Cambridge, with titles such as The ABC of Basic English (1928), and Debabelization (1931). The pedagogic effect of Basic English in the context of Britain’s declining imperial status is certainly worth further research; Winston Churchill, for example, urged support for Basic when he addressed Harvard University in 1943. Hulme the Tory would most probably have disapproved of another attempt to perfect life by social and political engineering, but he might have been enthusiastic about the purified quality of the resulting language. Like the Tractatus and Russell’s work on a ‘logically perfect language’, Basic is yet another attempt to reform language by reduction of superfluities. Basic differs from the purely philosophical projects of Russell and Wittgenstein in its aim of assisting to resolve social problems: not purifying the dialect of the tribe, but English in order that it become a world language. It is not too fanciful to view Basic’s 850 words as yet another form of Hulmean ‘small dry things’. As North argues, Ogden’s Basic project ‘echoes the aesthetic campaign on behalf of “complete clarity and simplicity” that Pound had been pursuing’ (1999, p. 60).14 So far I have sketched a nexus of historical and biographical connections between Hulme and other thinkers upon language in pre-war Cambridge. I want now to turn to a more specific account of what these links and acquaintances might amount to in terms of understanding Hulme’s position within modernist theories of language. As the editors of this volume note, Hulme’s work often demonstrated a pragmatist suspicion of language and a view that ‘linguistic renewal lay at the basis of any wider social renovation’ (Comentale and Gasiorek, 2005, p. 11). This was a view shared, although with differences both of approach and political vision, by thinkers such as Ogden and Wittgenstein.

Linguistic Revolutions During those early months in 1912 when Wittgenstein was beginning to clarify the philosophical project of the Tractatus, Hulme was probably composing ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, his most famous essay.15 This may be mere coincidence, but there are deeper links between modernist writers and thinkers who began to consider that, in Wittgenstein’s words, ‘Language disguises thought’ (1961, 4.002). Indeed, it might be argued that investigation into language, thought and modernity was a central concern in early twentieth-century British modernism.16 A proper assessment of Hulme’s role within these investigations

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involves setting his fragmentary comments within this wider context of the linguistic revolutions of modernism. In a series of stimulating and widely quoted essays in the 1980s Raymond Williams sketched out a provocative template for the social and cultural analysis of language in modernism. Williams suggests that the character of the metropolis – London, Paris, New York and so on – effected a profound change in the formal properties of modernist culture. These changes were prompted by the many cultural innovators who were immigrants to such cities, and fed into the theme of alienation that is so noticeable in many modernist works of the period. In addition, argues Williams, the effect of this interaction between the outsider and the city focused on the available mediums of expression: Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices. (1989, p. 45)17

It is worth noticing how Hulme, with his pronounced North Staffordshire accent, fits this picture of the artist liberated from a ‘provincial culture’ by the London of the pre-war years, quite as much as Americans such as Pound and Eliot. Hulme was also aware of the problems of ‘linguistic emancipation’ and of how the ‘thought or vocabulary of one’s period is an extraordinarily difficult thing to break away from’ (CW, p. 268). Williams asserts that although the perception of language as a medium was noticed more intensely by those for whom English, say, was a second language, even to native speakers ‘the new relationships of the metropolis, and the inescapable new uses in newspapers and advertising attuned to it, forced certain productive kinds of strangeness and distance’ (1989, p. 46). The productivity of these perceptions emerged in a sense that language was not a ‘customary and naturalized’ phenomenon, but a set of arbitrary conventions, and thus amenable to experimentation and alteration. Novels, for example, did not have to track the spread of generations across decades, as in Dickens, but could set their entire action on a single day (Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway); a poetic snapshot composed in ‘free verse’ – for example, Hulme’s ‘A City Sunset’ – might more accurately capture a poet’s impression of a city than the ballad stanzas employed by many 1890s poets of London, such as John Davidson, Laurence Binyon, or Richard Le Gallienne. The modern artists that Hulme championed in the pages of the New Age were equally preoccupied with how ‘strangeness and distance’ provoked experimental work within the media of painting and sculpture; artists such as Jacob Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, and Wyndham Lewis were also, in different ways, outsiders to the London within which they worked. We can also note Hulme’s argument, (derived from Worringer) in his essay ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, that the socalled ‘strangeness’ of the new geometrical art of Epstein and Lewis is precisely

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because of a certain form of ‘distance’: the tendency to abstraction in these works derives from a separation between humans and external nature, and from a rejection of the humanist desire to ‘empathize’ with natural forms. For Hulme this detachment is part of an on-going process whereby one of these two tendencies – abstraction or empathy – is found in the art and society of any period. For Williams, however, aesthetic and linguistic ‘strangeness and distance’ is explicitly conditioned by the social and historical determinants of modernism and modernity, and particularly by what he refers to as an intensified pressure towards the end of the nineteenth century to see the work of art as ‘artefact and commodity’ (1989, p. 46). This is a point to which I will return below. Clearly Williams’s arguments have a very general tenor, but we can find many examples of modernists to flesh out his account. And, as he notes, the phenomenon he is describing is found in ‘thinkers’ as well as poets and painters. We can recall Wittgenstein’s first meeting with Russell, ‘speaking very little English, but refusing to speak German’, and speculate upon how far Wittgenstein’s profound scrutiny of language as a medium – the logical form of all propositions analyzed by the Tractatus – derived from his own ‘strangeness and distance’ from the customary culture and language of English philosophy at the time. North, for example, stresses how Wittgenstein often utilized his deep sense of himself as an estranged and ‘foreign’ speaker of English as a mode of philosophical argument, particularly in his later work: in the Philosophical Investigations, for instance, Wittgenstein writes, ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”’ (1967, para. 123).18 Equally, the eccentric form of the Tractatus as a work of philosophy can be viewed as another modernist experiment deriving in part from Wittgenstein’s detachment from the prose ‘home’ of English philosophy; certainly nothing that Russell ever wrote came near the stylistic shock of Wittgenstein’s prose, with its pithy and enigmatic propositions: ‘The world is the totality of facts, not things’ (1961, 1.1); ‘Objects are simple’ (1961. 2.02); ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (1961, p. 7). It is perhaps not too fanciful to view the Tractatus as a form of Imagist prose, fulfilling Hulme’s view that ‘It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things’ (CW, p. 68). Certainly I. A. Richards perceived Wittgenstein’s lecturing style to embody a poetic tendency, shown in the title of Richards’s poem on Wittgenstein in Cambridge, ‘The Strayed Poet’. As Ray Monk notes, the poetic nomenclature fits certain aspects of Wittgenstein’s personality and style, as befitting someone who once remarked that, ‘philosophy ought really to be written as a poetic composition’ (1990, p. 291). The crystalline purity of the Tractatus not only resembles Imagist theories of poetry in its style, but also recalls another of its features, its view of the relation between words and the world. As Pound, praising Ford Madox Ford, put it later in Canto LXXXII the Imagists trusted more in res than in verba, a tendency also manifest in the atomistic thrust of the Tractatus. It was an attitude that Wyndham Lewis also detected in Hulme, commenting that, ‘We were a couple of fanatics and of course I am still. We preferred something more metallic and resistant than the pneumatic surface of the cuticle. We preferred a helmet to a head of hair. A scarab

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to a jelly-fish’ (1967, p. 104). Or, as Hulme put it bluntly in his ‘Notes on Language and Style’: ‘Dead things not men as the material for art’ (CW, p. 27). Perceiving language as a resistant medium could, as Williams demonstrates, result in many different tendencies. One significant trend is what we might call a reification of language, where the attention given to language results in a desire to turn words into things. ‘Language is made out of concrete things’, wrote Pound in 1915 (Pound, 1950, p. 49), summing up a certain inclination to reform language to ‘something more metallic and resistant’, in Lewis’s phrase. For Pound, Hulme and others the central problematic of language was its need to be reformed for the purposes of clarity; for many this led to a kind of obsession with the physicality or thingliness of language: In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and in the related theories of a ‘logically perfect language’ articulated by Russell (Russell, 1918, pp. 52-3), it often appears that the imprecision of words when they refer to things in the world might be alleviated by somehow making words more like the things to which they refer. There is a kind of extreme nominalism that haunts one form of modernism, where language is treated as a set of discrete entities or atoms, to be pinned onto objects in the world. Hulme saw nominalism, along with empiricism, as a ‘hereditary endowment’ of English amateur philosophers (CW, p. 440). Unfortunately for Hulme, this tendency is also found in the Austrian Wittgenstein, and his picture theory of meaning as outlined in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein writes that thoughts are expressed in propositions, and propositions are composed of ‘simple signs’, the primitive building blocks for language which he calls ‘names’: ‘A name means an object. The object is its meaning’ (1961, 3.203). The way in which simple signs are arranged, or ‘configured’ as Wittgenstein puts it, corresponds to the configuration or arrangement of the objects to which they refer: words are mirrored by things, and the logical form or shape of words in a proposition somehow mirrors the fact or idea that it is representing. Crucially, Wittgenstein writes that the ‘requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement that sense be determinate’ (1961, 3.23). In order for the ambiguities of language to be overcome words must be seen as ‘simple signs’, ‘small, dry things’ that picture and resemble objects in the world.

Reifications of Language How are we to understand this obsessive figuring of words as things, a strategy that often slides from a theory of how words represent things, to a view that words should ideally be treated as thingly entities? In other words, what is the meaning of a modernism committed, in Pound’s terms, to ‘the welding of word and thing’ (1950, p. 158)? One useful heuristic is to return to Williams’s notion that the work of art in modernism is increasingly conceived as both ‘artefact and commodity’. Desires to draw words closer to things are reactions to a world in which the experience of language is of something that is seemingly dematerialized. Marxist critics, such as Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, have argued that the reification of language

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in modernism is a compensation strategy to the dominant commodification of early twentieth-century capitalist societies. One form this resistance takes is by emphasis on the work of art as a linguistic artefact against its perceived degradation into a commodity. As Eagleton argues: ‘To fend off such reduction to commodity status, the modernist work brackets off the referent or real historical world, thickens its textures and deranges its forms to forestall instant consumability, and draws its own language protectively around it to become a mysterious autotelic object, free of all contaminating truck with the real (1985, p. 67). More recent work in modernist studies has questioned the gulf that Eagleton institutes here, between ‘the real’ and the language of modernism or between mass culture and a minority modernist art practice, suggesting that modernists were entwined within, rather than just resistant to, practices of the cultural marketplace of the early twentieth century.19 However, in the case of someone like Hulme it is certainly true that he perceived the language of modern art and poetry, and its qualities of innovation and difficulty, to be distinct from more public discourses. In ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ Hulme asserted that: Language, we have said, only expresses the lowest common denominator of the emotions of one kind. It leaves out all the individuality of an emotion as it really exists and substitutes for it a kind of stock or type emotion . . . The average person as distinct from the artist does not even perceive the individuality of their own emotions . . . The artist . . . should be a person who is able to emancipate himself from the moulds which language and ordinary perception force upon him and be able to see things freshly as they really are. (CW, p. 202-3).

For Hulme poetry is ‘always the advance guard of language’, emancipating art from the common language of prose, or what he called ‘counter language’, in order to express new thoughts. Poetry is a discourse that can ‘Transfer [the] Physical to Language’, as one of the headings in ‘Notes on Language and Style’ puts it, is able to preserve ‘an entirely physical thing, a real clay before me . . . an image’; for Hulme, a word ‘is a board with an image or statue on it’, when he speaks in prose all that passes is the board, and the ‘statue remains in my imagination’ (CW, p. 27). Only in poetry can the visual and the physical, the statue, be communicated, and for this to occur a form of reification of language must happen. In this way Hulme’s theories paved the way for an Imagist poetry that thickened its textures, in Eagleton’s words, and became a series of small, mysterious objects that could not be instantly consumed by readers used to the stock types of ordinary language. The source for the theories of reification articulated by critics such as Jameson and Eagleton is a lengthy essay by Georg Lukács from 1922. Lukács’s essay on reification can be read, partially, as a text displaying many of the concerns of modernist aesthetics. Jameson asserts that this essay, along with Lukács’s literary criticism, revolves around the conceptual opposition, derived from Hegel, between the concrete and the abstract (Jameson, 1971, p. 163). For Sanford Schwartz, in his panoramic exploration of the ‘matrix of modernism’, one of the key philosophical bifurcations in all modernist poetics and in much of early twentieth-century

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western philosophy is precisely that between abstraction and concrete sensation (1985, p. 6). Lukács’s use of this modernist binary derives from Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form: the commodity represents the ‘formal equality of human labour in the abstract’ (Lukács, 1971, p. 87). But this abstraction is also a structure of concretion, since the ‘formal act of exchange . . . suppresses use-value as usevalue and establishes a relation of concrete equality between concretely unequal and indeed incomparable objects’ (1971, p. 104). Lukács’s critique of commodification is a modernist one, in the sense that it focuses upon form. Every object, writes Lukács, ‘exists as an immediate inseparable complex of form and content’, but commodification of thought and society produces an ‘indifference of form towards content’; real content, he argues, exists as a ‘material substratum of the object’, a deep and concrete amalgam of form and content (p. 126). In this way Lukács echoes other modern thinkers such as Bergson or Freud who search for meaningful depths to meaningless surfaces. Lukács’s criticism that reification ignores the ‘material substratum’ of objects also finds an obvious comparison in Imagism’s search beyond poetic abstraction for a language replete with, in Pound’s phrase, a ‘Direct treatment of the “thing”’ (Pound, 1972, p. 129). Hulme’s importance for Imagism consists in the fact that he provides the basis of a theory of language that grants value to Lukács the poet within a modern commodified society. Politically, Hulme differs greatly from Lukács, but in his analysis of the role of poetic language Hulme also offers a critique of the abstractions of commodification and a justification, with political implications, for a poetry rooted in the ‘concrete’. Public language, argues Hulme, was reliant for its continuation upon the poet: ‘Poetry [is] always the advance guard of language’ (CW, p. 27), since ‘plain speech is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors . . . that it can be made precise’ (CW, p. 26). When metaphors are no longer new they become an abstract discourse, since ‘abstract words are merely codified dead metaphors’ (CW, p. 96).20 Poetry epitomizes a language which resists abstraction through its creation of metaphors, a task assisted by the visual dimension of metaphor: ‘every word in the language originates as a live metaphor, but gradually of course all visual meaning goes out of them and they become a kind of counters. Prose is in fact the museum where the dead metaphors of the poets are preserved’ (CW, p. 197). A ‘counter’ language is Hulme’s term for abstract forms of language, and also suggests a modern, reified rationality of mathematics or money. Poetry is not a ‘counter’ language but is rooted in the ‘visual meanings’ of metaphor; for the poet, ‘Each word must be an image seen, not a counter’ (CW, p. 25). Images are valued since ‘Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images’ (CW, p. 29); language is therefore at something of a remove from this source and, notes Hulme, ‘We replace meaning (i.e. vision) with words’ (CW, p. 24). This theory of visual meaning is, of course, significant for the development of Imagist aesthetics – it derives from Hulme’s reading in nineteenth-century French philosophers such as Theodule Ribot, Hyppolite Taine, and most importantly, Bergson.21 In Bergson’s Introduction à la Metaphysique, translated by Hulme in

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1913, Bergson asserts that ‘the Image has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete’ (1913, p. 14).22 In ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ Hulme claims that the French philosopher shows reality to be ‘a flux of interpenetrated elements unseized by the intellect’ (CW, p. 193). The intellect is an analytic faculty capable only of understanding the world in terms of conceptual abstractions. Reality can only be grasped by intuition, a faculty of concrete experience that bursts through the everchanging surface appearances of objects to capture their ‘real duration’ (durée réelle). Bergson’s model, which rejects surface for depth, and in which formal intellect is ousted by sensual intuition, approaches Lukács’s search for the ‘material substratum’ of objects.23 Bergson argues that such a search is hampered by language, which works to deceive our sensual experiences. Hulme’s essay stresses this failure at length. Our ordinary perceptions of the world are mediated by language, a ‘communal apparatus’ (CW, p. 200) that only ‘expresses the lowest common denominator’ (CW, p. 202) of a sensual emotion. Only the artist can see through these ‘stock types which are embodied in language’ (CW, p. 202). The artist can ‘emancipate himself from the moulds which language and ordinary perception force upon him’ (CW, pp. 202-3), and once emancipated from linguistic abstractions, the artist can communicate an ‘actual contact with reality’ and therefore offer ‘an intimate realisation of an object’ (CW, p. 203). Hulme’s argument here recalls Williams’s characterization of one significant tendency within modernist writing in relation to language: a view that everyday language is a blockage to some true underlying consciousness or state of feeling, and that literature must seek to break through these restrictive barriers through new modes of expression (1989, pp. 73-7). The poet’s ‘intimate realisation of an object’ is clearly a form of this position; it also recalls Wittgenstein’s search for the logical form of the proposition underlying all linguistic representations. And a similar position, though not explicitly related to language, is found in Lukács’s search for the material substratum of objects viewed as abstract commodities. Hulme’s particular vision of this quest was to focus upon poetic language in an attempt to show that ‘beauty may be in small, dry things’ (CW, p. 68), a view most fully articulated in the essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. In this essay Hulme retains the notion of a ‘realisation of objects’ by means of a visual and concrete language, but the Bergsonian influence is now replaced, to an extent, by an aesthetic politics of ‘classicism’. Alan Robinson has argued that Hulme’s aesthetic preference for Tory classicism should be situated within the wider social and political changes in the years running up to the outbreak of war.24 Continued suffragette action, the first Labour members of Parliament in 1906, waves of industrial strikes throughout 1911-12, and the prospect of mass enfranchisement threatened by the Liberal party posed a threat to the aristocratic old regime. Perry Anderson argues that in response to assaults upon aristocratic privilege, certain writers, like Hulme, began to advocate an aesthetic rooted in classical, conservative values. Interestingly, Anderson sees this adoption of a ‘partially aristocratic colouration’ of modernist culture as part of a reaction to commodification as much as to liberal reforms of the political landscape: ‘the old

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order . . . afforded a set of available codes and resources from which the ravages of the market as an organizing principle of culture and society – uniformly detested by every species of modernism – could be resisted’ (1984, p. 105). Hulme thus represents a cultural moment that Pound was to name in 1914 as the emergence of an ‘aristocracy of the arts’, a group ready to take over from the declining ruling body, but eager to employ a similar vocabulary against commodification (Pound, 1914, p. 68). Hulme starts ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ with the stark claim that after a hundred years of romanticism, classical values are ripe for revival. Romanticism, for Hulme, is a kind of hazy belief in the perfectibility of human beings, a ‘spilt religion’ in which concepts such as heaven and hell are mixed up, a confusion which will ‘falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience’ (CW, p. 62). If romantic thought lacks Imagistic ‘clear edges’, romantic verse is organized around ‘metaphors of flight’, again ignoring properly delimited borders. Romantic verse constantly refers to the word ‘infinite’, while classicism is bound, both aesthetically and politically, by a sense of man as ‘an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal’ (CW, p. 61). Classical verse is ‘dry’ and ‘hard’, displays a profound sense of the finite, and can express clarity and precision, even using the clumsy ‘communal thing’ of language (CW, p. 69). In its finite materiality classical verse approximates to the very essence of poetic, as opposed to prose, language. Now Hulme proceeds to distinguish poetry and prose once again: In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters which are moved about according to rules, without being visualised at all in the process. There are in prose certain type situations and arrangements of words, which move as automatically into certain other arrangements as do functions in algebra. One only changes the X’s and Y’s back into physical things at the end of the process. (CW, pp. 69-70)

Prose is rationalized abstraction that lacks visual form and is thus a language in which ‘concrete things’ are dematerialized. Communication in prose is then an ‘automatic’ procedure, conforming to fixed mathematical processes. It is a good parody of the commodity, which as exchange-value ignores the coarsely sensuous material of the object for its abstract value as congealed labour-time.25 For Hulme formal abstraction can be countered by poetic language: ‘Poetry . . . may be considered as an effort to avoid this characteristic of prose. It is not a counter language, but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process’ (CW, p. 70). Schwartz comments that this passage shows Hulme’s distance from Bergson: ‘Associating abstraction with movement and sensation with fixity . . . Hulme seems far more attracted to stasis rather than motion, form rather than flux’ (1985, p. 56). Poetic language can ‘arrest’ the abstract processes of prose and, once arrested, a more accurate picture of ‘physical things’ is obtainable. Hulme is still indebted to Bergson for the idea of a ‘language of intuition’, but departs from Bergsonian thought in his usage of the concept. A

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visual poetic language is a substitute for a more corporeal discourse, seemingly reducing the sensuous capacities of bodies to the faculty of sight alone. The argument recalls Fredric Jameson’s claim that the visual pleasure one takes in colourful and sensual images, such as those of modernist painting, is designed to ‘restore at least a symbolic experience of libidinal gratification to a world drained of it’ by the effects of reification (1981, p. 63). But the libidinal compensation that Hulme offers only replicates the processes of reification itself: an arresting look that prevents one being subject to an ‘abstract process’ by producing a form of stasis occurring from a reifying gaze. This problem is shown in Hulme’s example of a visual concrete aesthetic: If you are walking behind a woman in the street, you notice the curious way in which the skirt rebounds from her heels. If that peculiar kind of motion becomes of such interest to you that you will search about until you can get the exact epithet which hits it off, there you have a properly aesthetic emotion. But it is the zest with which you look at the thing which decides you to make the effort. (CW, pp. 70-1)

Poetic language is a compromise for a more physical language of the body, one rooted in the act of looking. The gender politics of this example is of course the problematic issue here, with the sexualized gaze – the ‘zest’ of looking – determining the appropriate aesthetic emotion. This is clearly a gendered form of ‘libidinal gratification’, deriving from an active male look that arrests female movement. This is shown in numerous places in Hulme’s work, as when he refers to words as physical things, ‘Want to make them stand up . . . e.g. walking on dark boulevard. Girl hidden in trees passes on other side. How to get this’ (CW, p. 32).26 This slightly sinister example requires what we might call a language of tumescence, of the kind that Hulme argues for earlier: ‘A man cannot write without seeing at the same time a visual signification before his eyes. It is this image which precedes the writing and makes it firm’ (CW, p. 25). ‘Solidity’, he sums up, is ‘a pleasure’ (CW, p. 26). His criterion for successful poetry in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is thus based upon this conflation of visuality, desire and solidity: ‘Is there any zest in it? Did the poet have an actually realised visual object before him in which he delighted?’ (CW, p. 71). Realizing an object, as a metaphor for recovering its commodified ‘material substratum’, reifies (female) form as an object for (male) contemplative zest. The point here is not simply to invalidate Hulme’s theories by reference to his less than progressive gender politics.27 Rather it is to indicate one of the possible consequences of the modernist reification of language. Another issue at stake here is how far Hulme’s ideas about the materiality of language fed directly into Imagist poetry, an issue that is difficult to resolve given the disagreements amongst the main protagonists of the movement. F. S. Flint, in his premature history of Imagism in 1915, argued that Hulme was the ‘ringleader’ and that he insisted ‘on absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage’ (1915, p. 71). Pound initially praised Hulme in similar terms, stating that the word ‘Imagist’ had been invented

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‘on a Hulme basis’ (Harmer, 1975, p. 214). Pound certainly attended Hulme’s lectures in the winter of 1911, writing an account of them in the Egoist. Aside from such accreditations of influence the more significant feature of Hulme’s work was its clear theorization of the benefits of a poetic language of concrete visual objects; the pleasure of solidity in language was something Pound and other Imagists constantly upheld, seeing it as the way to a more direct poetic discourse. For Hulme this solidity took different forms at different times in his work: the early insistence that all ‘poetry is an affair of the body’ (CW, p. 21) seemed indebted to Bergson’s materialism; this was then followed by the claim in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ that the new poetry resembles sculpture, more than music, in the way it has to ‘mould images . . . into definite shapes’ (CW, p. 56). Certainly this sculptural vision of verse was taken seriously by Imagists such as Pound, and also by, for example, Richard Aldington, who wrote in 1914 that Imagist poems display a ‘hardness, as of cut stone’ (1914, p. 202). This is also a fine description, to an extent, of Wittgenstein’s view of language in the Tractatus, although this text is possibly more architectural than sculptural in form. The connections I have tried to suggest between Hulme, Russell, Ogden and Wittgenstein all concern the nature of language in the ‘new age’ of modernism. In Hulme’s final essays on modern art there is an acute awareness that the abstract art of Epstein, Lewis, or Bomberg represented a novel aesthetic vocabulary, and that in order ‘to define the characteristics of a new movement’ a precise attention to definitions is required. What Hulme repeatedly figured as the ‘break-up’ of an attitude, that of the Renaissance and its humanism, demanded a breaking up of old views of language, and a clarification of the new. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein argued that without ‘philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries’ (1961, 4.112). This was a view equally held by Hulme: it fed into the central tenets of Imagism, which in Pound’s version displayed a ‘hard light, clear edges’ and a ‘trust in the thing more than the word’ (Pound, 1950, p. 89). The reform, reduction or reification of language was a theme shared by these diverse thinkers, part of a general consciousness that the material of language required rethinking in order fully to address key issues in the contemporary social world. We can interpret this consciousness, I have argued, in terms of two, related, arguments: Williams’s analysis of the impact of the city upon linguistic experimentation, as well the views of Lukács, Eagleton and Jameson upon aesthetic responses to commodification in the early twentieth century. Hulme’s contribution to this modernist ‘revolution of the word’ is surely worth attention for its articulation of significant trends and attitudes. It shows how illuminating is the juxtaposition of a philosophic ‘amateur’ with a few professionals.

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Notes 1 See Alun Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme, p. 21 and Robert Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme, chapter 2, for information on these misdemeanours. 2 For Bergson’s letter see Hulme, Selected Writings, (ed.) Patrick McGuinness, p. xv. For Hulme’s two articles from 1911 on the Bologna Congress see ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’ and ‘The International Philosophical Congress at Bologna’ in Collected Writings. 3 This was published as The Philosophy of Bergson in 1914. 4 This, and subsequent issues, contained a large advertisement from the publisher Stephen Swift and Co. for Hulme’s translation of Bergson and for his Introduction to Bergson, said to be in press. This latter volume never appeared. 5 For information upon the impact of Bergson in the English speaking world see Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism, 2003; Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism, 1985; and Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality, 1987, chapter 1. 6 See Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: The Early Years 1872World War I, 1967, p. 166. Russell and Whitehead published the influential three volume work on logic Principia Mathematica (1910-13). 7 For an overview of Russell’s criticism see his chapter on Bergson in A History of Western Philosophy, 1946, chapter 28. 8 See G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Language, Sense and Nonsense, 1984, pp. 2-3. 9 For an overview of this wartime disagreement, see Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, 2002, pp. 235-42. Ferguson doubts that Russell and Hulme ever met. 10 Michael North, Reading 1922, 1999, chapter 1. As North notes, Myers was also one of the founders of workplace industrial psychology (pp. 57-8). 11 See North, Reading 1922, pp. 33-9, for an account of the ramifications of the translation of the Tractatus. For the correspondence between Ogden and Wittgenstein on the Tractatus, see Wittgenstein, Letters to C. K. Ogden. 12 For an overview of Ogden’s work, see the essays in P. Sargant Florence and J. R. L. Anderson (eds.), C. K. Ogden: A Collective Memoir. 13 Ogden was also important in the disciplinary development of English studies, as shown by his collaboration with I. A. Richards on two key texts, The Foundation of Aesthetics (1922) and The Meaning of Meaning (1923). 14 North links together the Tractatus, Ogden’s work, and Poundian modernism as projects sharing a kind of zeal for ‘debabelization’ (pp. 61-4). 15 According to Karen Csengeri, Hulme composed ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ late in 1911 or early in 1912, perhaps giving it as a lecture in July 1912 in London. See Collected Writings, p. 59. 16 For discussions of these issues, see April McMahon, ‘Language: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”’ in David Bradshaw (ed.), A Companion to Modernism; and Roy Harris (ed.), Linguistic Thought in Britain 1914-45. 17 For a sympathetic critique of Williams’s arguments, see North, Reading 1922, pp. 11-15. 18 See North, Reading 1922, pp. 40-1. 19 For versions of this argument, see Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 1998 and Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism, 2001. 20 Schwartz traces this point to Remy de Gourmont. See The Matrix of Modernism, p. 57. 21 See Wallace Martin, ‘The Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic’, 1970, p. 180. 22 In Matter and Memory, Bergson suggest that matter is ‘an aggregate of “images”’ (p. 9).

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23 Schwartz argues that Hulme’s interpretation of Bergson is a creative misreading, which signals a shift from ‘the subjective to the objective side of experience’. Bergson thought that the artist could slice through the abstract perceptions of everyday life in order to grasp the underlying durée of existence; the artist thus apprehended a subjective flux of experience. Hulme, argues Schwartz, ‘seems less interested in recovering real duration than in rendering the objects of perception as precisely as possible’. For Bergson duration was a temporal and fluid phenomenon; Hulme emphasized the spatial fixity of artistic forms. His concrete poetry aimed at stopping ‘you gliding through an abstract process’ (Schwartz, 1985, p. 134). 24 Alan Robinson, Poetry, Painting and Ideas 1885-1914, 1985, chapter 4. 25 See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume 1), 1976, pp. 130-8. 26 See also Hulme’s comments on the ‘two tarts walking down Piccadilly on tiptoe’ (CW, p. 28). 27 Reading Ferguson’s recent biography clearly reveals Hulme’s very traditional view of the roles he expected for women, especially those of his lover Kate Lechmere.

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Chapter 3

‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme Rebecca Beasley

The great difficulty in any talk about art lies in the extreme indefiniteness of the vocabulary you are obliged to employ. The concepts by which you endeavour to describe your attitude toward any work of art are so extraordinarily fluid. Words like creative, expressive, vital, rhythm, unity and personality are so vague that you can never be sure when you use them that you are conveying over at all the meaning you intended to. This is constantly realised unconsciously; in almost every decade a new catch word is invented which for a few years after its invention does convey, to a small set of people at any rate, a definite meaning, but even that very soon lapses into a fluid condition when it means anything and nothing. T. E. Hulme, Collected Writings, p. 191

T. E. Hulme’s art criticism has long been accorded a key role in literary histories of modernism. Like Roger Fry and Clive Bell, whose art criticism he simultaneously draws upon and explicitly rejects, Hulme is credited with introducing readings of visual art whose influence extended beyond the boundaries of art history into literary criticism. Joseph Frank’s 1945 article, ‘Spatial Form in Literature’, is only the most famous example of a literary analysis that categorized modernist literature according to the formulations of Hulme’s art criticism and his most well-known source, Wilhelm Worringer’s 1908 doctoral dissertation, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. But we might see all criticism that harnesses the distinctive forms of Vorticist painting and sculpture to its definitions of literary modernism as deeply indebted to Hulme’s contemporary advocacy, not least in the exclusionary tactics required to mark off the ‘radical modernism’ of Hulme, Lewis and Pound from related early twentieth-century projects. This has been facilitated, to a certain extent, by placing an emphasis on Worringer’s contribution to Hulme’s art criticism that has effectively eclipsed the significance of its British critical context. This essay, therefore, traces the emergence of Hulme’s art criticism out of a dialogue with the Impressionist and realist Camden Town Group and the PostImpressionist Bloomsbury groupings, in order to review the ‘definite meaning[s]’ Hulme’s terms conveyed to this ‘small set of people’ (CW, p. 191). Hulme’s art criticism was far more closely engaged with the full variety of modernist art production than his own rhetoric, and that of later critics, suggests. Hulme published only eight items of art criticism during his lifetime, and three of those were restricted to brief notes introducing a reproduced image. All eight

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appeared in A. R. Orage’s socialist periodical, the New Age, over a six-month period, between 25 December 1913 and 9 July 1914. In addition to the material Hulme published himself, an earlier series of notes on ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ (ca. 1911-12) was edited by Herbert Read and published posthumously as ‘The Notebooks of T. E. Hulme’ in the New Age in 1922 and in Speculations two years later. Hulme’s most extensive discussion of his theory of art, the lecture ‘The New Art and Its Philosophy’, was delivered to the Quest Society on 22 January 1914, but not published until it appeared in Speculations as ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’. A piece titled ‘The Plan for a Book on Modern Theories of Art’, probably composed at some point between 1911 and early 1913, was published as an appendix in Speculations. Hulme was writing a book about Jacob Epstein at the time of his death in 1917; the manuscript has never been found, but Hulme’s most recent biographer has published new information about it, discovered in a number of letters and in its projected publisher’s archives (Ferguson, 2002, pp. 243-55).

67 Frith Street: An Education in Contemporary Art The biographical context for Hulme’s art criticism is well established. There are numerous contemporary accounts of Hulme’s famous Tuesday night salon, held at 67 Frith Street between 1911 and 1914: as Alun Jones commented, ‘no biography or autobiography of the period seems to be complete unless the writer’s impression of Hulme and his Frith Street gathering is included’ (Jones, 1960, p. 95). ‘Hulme had the most wonderful gift of knowing every one and mixing every one’, remembered Christopher Nevinson, ‘there were journalists, writers, poets, painters, politicians of all sorts, from Conservatives to New Age Socialists, Fabians, Irish yaps, American bums, and Labour leaders’. ‘The refreshment . . . was chiefly beer’ (1937, p. 63), and the primary mode of discourse was argument: ‘there was nothing, actually, about which we were united’, recalled Hulme’s friend, the playwright and drama critic Ashley Dukes, and Hulme’s own argumentative style appears to have made a particular impression on his guests: ‘he would sit for hours unwinding, as it were, general ideas, with expansive gestures which began and ended in the region of his chest’, wrote Dukes (1942, pp. 40-1), and Richard Curle recalled similarly that ‘to hear Hulme develop general ideas and abstractions was like studying an elaborate pattern whose inner lines and texture emerge gradually as you gaze. Nothing seemed beyond his range’ (1937, p. 277). While the diversity of participants in Hulme’s salon is welcome testimony to the range of influences on early modernist thinking, several of the guests noted a particular focus on contemporary art. W. H. Davies described the evenings as ‘mostly for artists, and not so much for literary people’ (1925, pp. 157-8); John Gould Fletcher recalled that Hulme ‘was far more interested in modern art and philosophy than poetry’ (1937, p. 75); Ashley Dukes remembered contemporary art as the midwife of Imagism, writing that ‘our general interest in “abstract” art led us especially to a revaluation of the images of poetry’ (1942, p. 41). Even so, the list of artists attending Hulme’s salon has struck subsequent commentators as

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surprisingly varied. It not only included the artists later affiliated to or associated with the Vorticist group, who would form the focus of Hulme’s criticism, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis and Christopher Nevinson; the more numerous group were the ‘Neo-Realist’ artists of the Camden Town Group, Robert Bevan, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore and, at least once, Walter Sickert (Davies, 1925, p. 157; Jones, 1960, p. 98). Hulme attended Sickert’s and Bevan’s ‘at homes’ in return (Ferguson, 2002, p. 150; Hamnett, 1932, p. 37; Bevan, 1965, p. 18). In 1911, however, these artists would have appeared a far more cohesive group; they were all, for example, high-profile exhibitors at the Allied Artists’ Association exhibitions, the non-juried exhibitions initiated by the Sunday Times art critic Frank Rutter in imitation of the Salon des Indépendants. Nevinson later commented that ‘[John] Lavery, Sickert, Spencer Gore, Ginner, Gilman, [Lucien] Pissaro and Wyndham Lewis were the backbone of the exhibition’ (1937, p. 56). They were all associated, to varying degrees, with the promotion of French PostImpressionism, and their work was identified with recent French, rather than English, stylistic innovation. But they were formally allied too: Lewis was a member of the Camden Town Group, in fact one of only two artists outside Sickert’s Fitzroy Street circle invited to become one of the sixteen founding members (Baron, 2000, pp. 45, 24-43). When the Camden Town Group became the much broader-based London Group towards the end of 1913, new members included Epstein, Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth; David Bomberg and Gaudier-Brzeska were elected to membership in the group’s first months.1 Hulme actively contributed to this group’s formation. Nevinson describes the London Group as ‘originat[ing]’ in Hulme’s salon, and remarks that ‘Gilman was the motive force. Slowly but surely with the help of Hulme he gathered all the warring elements of Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Neo-Primitives, Vorticists, Cubists, and Futurists’ (1937, p. 63). This is not to deny that even in 1911 observers were able to perceive considerable diversity across the work of these artists. Although Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism loomed large in the Camden Town Group’s heritage through its Fitzroy Street origins and the tutelage of its most senior members, Walter Sickert and Lucien Pissaro, by the time of its first exhibition in June 1911 more recent influences were ensuring increasing stylistic variety. As Ginner later recalled, Gilman, for example, ‘was still influenced by Sickert but a somewhat higher key of colour was creeping in and he was already beginning to expound his contempt for “mud”, as he termed it, in painting’ (1945, p. 134). Lewis was working in a somewhat different idiom, ‘touching the fringe of cubism, anathema to certain of the members’ (1945, p. 130). The Times began its review of their second exhibition, in December 1911, by remarking, ‘The Camden Town Group is not a school, but only a convenient name for a number of artists who exhibit together’ (‘Picture Shows’, 1911, p. 12). Nevertheless, the fact that they exhibited together, and the terms by which they exhibited together, indicated significant ideological sympathies. The group was founded, according to Ginner, ‘to hold within a fixed and limited circle those

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painters whom they considered to be the best and most promising of the day’ (1945, pp. 130-1). Their interpretation of the ‘best and most promising’ was formulated in opposition to the conservative Royal Academy, and also the New English Art Club, once the progressive champion of impressionism, but increasingly perceived, wrote a Times reviewer, as ‘one of the strongest conservative forces in the artistic life of the country’ (‘The New English Art Club’, 1913, p. 71, col. c).2 The New English Art Club’s hostility to Post-Impressionism in general, and to Roger Fry’s 1910 exhibition, ‘Manet and the PostImpressionists’ in particular, had formed the immediate impetus for the group’s foundation in spring 1911 as an alternative exhibiting society. Yet at the same time, the group’s ‘fixed and limited’ membership also distinguished it from the inclusive and democratic Allied Artists’ Association, with which anyone could exhibit, and which was organized by committees of exhibitors chosen alphabetically. While the Camden Town Group painters continued to exhibit at the A.A.A. exhibitions, they also agreed on the necessity of exhibiting as a small and selective group, one of the implications of which was the exclusion of women because ‘some members might desire, perhaps even under pressure, to bring in their wives or lady friends and this might make things rather uncomfortable between certain members of the elect, for these wives or lady friends might not come up to the standard aimed at by the group’ (Ginner, 1945, p. 130). In placing themselves between the conservative establishment and the inclusiveness of the A.A.A., and in their championing of recent French art, the Camden Town Group occupied an ideological space proximate to the nascent groupings of Bloomsbury artists led by Fry, and indeed, the groups fostered significant collaboration. When Malcolm Lightfoot resigned from the Camden Town Group and subsequently committed suicide in September 1911, he was replaced by Duncan Grant.3 In December 1911, a number of the Bloomsbury and Camden Town artists exhibited together in the first exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society at Manchester City Art Gallery. The same month, Fry invited Lewis to join him and Vanessa Bell, Frederick Etchells, Jessie Etchells and Grant in what would become the Grafton Group. In May the following year Ginner and Gore exhibited with this group and Charles Holmes and Helen Saunders in Fry’s exhibition of ‘Quelques Artistes Indépendants Anglais’ in Paris (Collins, 1983, pp. 19-23), and in October 1912, Clive Bell selected Camden Town members Gore, Henry Lamb and Lewis, as well as Bernard Adeney, Frederick Etchells, Jessie Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, Eric Gill, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth as ‘The English Group’ at the ‘Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition’ (Collins, 1983, p. 27; Robins, 1997, p. 89). By autumn of 1913, it is no wonder that Sickert was considering a formal merger of the Camden Town and Grafton groups: ‘it would make the only interesting crowd in London’ (Baron, 2000, p. 60).

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Terms of Debate The ideological unity of these various artists was further suggested by the critical terminology they developed to describe their work. Initially, they drew on Paterian formulations to distinguish Post-Impressionism from Naturalism and Impressionism: in his introduction to the catalogue for ‘Manet and the PostImpressionists’, Desmond MacCarthy had the Post-Impressionists address the Impressionists by saying, ‘“You have explored nature in every direction, and all honour to you; but your methods and principles have hindered artists from exploring and expressing that emotional significance which lies in things, and is the most important subject matter of art”’ (1910, p. 9). Such an expressivist stance could assert theoretical conformity, while insisting on the importance of individual vision: thus MacCarthy was able to describe the Post-Impressionist method as enabling ‘the individuality of the artist to find completer self-expression in his work than is possible to those who have committed themselves to representing objects more literally’ (1910, p. 7). As late as December 1913, J. B. Manson, writing one of the two catalogue prefaces to the ‘Exhibition by the Camden Town Group and Others’ at the Public Art Galleries in Brighton, deployed the same strategy to explain the formation of the London Group as the extension ‘of the means of free expression’ from the Camden Town Group ‘to other artists who were experimenting with new methods, who were seeking or who had found means of expressing their ideas, their visions, their conceptions in their own way . . . More eclectic in its constitution, it will no longer limit itself to the cultivation of one single school of thought, but will offer hospitality to all manner of artistic expression provided it has the quality of sincere personal conviction’ (1913, pp. 78). By the time Manson wrote this preface, however, his terms were already showing their age. The previous year, Clive Bell had introduced his definition of art as ‘significant form’ in his introduction to ‘The English Group’ at the ‘Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition’, and Fry had deployed his more tentative version, ‘expressive form’. For both, the move towards a more formalist rhetoric hardened up the distinctions between Post-Impressionism, and romanticism and realism: Fry wrote that ‘the distinguishing characteristic of the French artists’ exhibited was ‘the markedly Classic spirit of their work’, by which he meant ‘that they do not rely for their effect upon associated ideas, as I believe Romantic and Realistic artists invariably do’ (1912, p. 16). He had made the same observation about Sickert and the Camden Town Group two years before: Sickert, he wrote, ‘has steadily refused to acknowledge the effect upon the mind of the associated ideas of objects; has considered solely their pictorial value as opposed to their ordinary emotional qualities’, and ‘The Camden Town group . . . are all characterised by their concentration on this purely pictorial and non-romantic attitude’ (1911, p. 21). Bell’s prime example of significant form was Wyndham Lewis’ work: ‘Hardly at all does it depend for its effect on association or suggestion. There is no reason why a mind sensitive to form and colour, although it inhabit another solar system, and a body altogether unlike our own, should fail to appreciate it’ (1912, p. 22).

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Lewis himself echoed Fry’s and Bell’s definitions in the preface that followed Manson’s, his introduction to ‘Room III. (The Cubist Room)’ at the ‘Exhibition by the Camden Town Group and Others’, albeit in somewhat more polemical terms: ‘All revolutionary painting to-day has in common the rigid reflections of steel and stone in the spirit of the artist, that desire for stability as though a machine were being built to fly or kill with; an alienation from the traditional photographer’s trade and realisation of the value of colour and form as such independently of what recognisable form it covers or encloses’ (1913, pp. 11-12). When Hulme composed his first piece of art criticism in December 1913, then, the critical framework around modern art was well established. The expressivist formulations that had dominated initial criticism of the Post-Impressionists still lingered, but they were increasingly combined with, and in some quarters giving way to, a more formalist approach, of which Bell’s was the most emphatic. The key terms of the new formalist criticism – design, geometry, the relation of forms and planes, rhythm and abstraction – insisted on the independence of the art work as an expressive object in its own right, rather than as a signifier of some other, primary, reality, whether that reality was a landscape, a vase of sunflowers, or the artist’s emotion. But just at the point when the war against naturalism seemed to have been largely won, the alliance of the progressives shattered into antagonistic artistic factions. The acrimonious departure of Lewis, Etchells, Hamilton and Wadsworth from Fry’s Omega Workshops in October 1913 terminated Sickert’s hopes of merging the Camden Town Group with the Grafton Group, and turned the London Group against Fry. It was at this point, as the politics of the factions sought definition, that Hulme took up his pen. But before looking at what he wrote at that moment, it is necessary to review his previous aesthetic commitments.

Bergson, Berenson, Binyon, etc. Hulme’s comments on the visual arts are relatively rare before December 1913. In ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, written in 1908, but probably revised in 1914 (Sherry, 1993, pp. 39, 202), he briefly refers to Whistler; in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, written in late 1911 or early 1912, he mentions Raphael, Titian, Turner and Constable, and he returns to the same terrain in the notes for ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, probably composed during the same period, praising Constable again and citing with approval Bernard Berenson’s discussion of Giotto in The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance. ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ also contains a reference to Laurence Binyon’s influential book on Chinese and Japanese art, The Flight of the Dragon, and a complimentary anecdote about Sickert. On 6 May 1911 Hulme sent a postcard of a Giotto fresco at the Basilica of S. Francesco in Assisi to his sister, on which he wrote that ‘This church in Assisi is very interesting, for it was practically the beginning of all modern art’. Commenting on the card’s photograph, he remarked, ‘Of course, it doesn’t look much, but when you see the kind of thing that came before it you realise how wonderful it was’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 93; Csengeri, 1986, p. 106).

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In the early twentieth century, these touchstones would have indicated a wellinformed and up-to-date knowledge of art, if not a particularly distinctive taste. Whistler was still an iconic figure for the avant-garde, his anti-establishment criticism a key reference point for the modern artist, and his paintings the perceptual framework for descriptions of urban modernity long after Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that ‘people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects’ (1891, p. 40). Constable was receiving renewed attention in the first years of the century: C. J. Holmes’ Constable and his Influence on Landscape Painting in 1902 marked the beginning of serious scholarship on ‘the parent of the modern landscape’, though it continued to promote the prevalent theory that ‘personal freedom . . . was the guiding principle of Constable’s life’, leading him to reject academic formulae for the supposedly untrammelled naturalism that governed modern painting (Holmes, 1901, p. 1; Holmes, 1902, p. 216). Early Italian painting had been the focus of considerable scholarly interest since the mid-nineteenth century, and Berenson’s classic work on the Florentine school had first appeared in 1896. It portrayed Florentine painting as ‘pre-eminently an art formed by great personalities’, in which ‘each man of genius brought to bear upon his art a great intellect, which . . . was tirelessly striving to reincarnate what it comprehended of life in forms that could fitly convey it to others’ (Berenson, 1896, p. 2). Finally, Binyon’s The Flight of the Dragon, published in 1911, was enormously influential in establishing a vocabulary not only for East Asian art, but modern Western art too. Binyon had published the highly-praised Painting in the Far East in 1908, the first Englishlanguage overview of the subject, which had successfully moved the British knowledge of East Asian art beyond the late nineteenth-century craze for chinoiserie and japonisme. In The Flight of the Dragon Binyon turned his focus to the technical qualities of Chinese and Japanese art, deploying a Post-Impressionistinspired vocabulary of ‘ordered relations’, ‘units of line or mass’ and ‘rhythmical relation’, which was immediately taken up by advocates of modern art like Huntly Carter in the New Age (Binyon, 1911, p. 17; Carter, 1911, p. 36). Although Hulme’s canon is hardly unusual, his particular remarks suggest a specific reason for its formation. All these examples were understood at the time to challenge the notion of art history as a history of representational ability. In these references to the visual arts Hulme is developing his long-standing interest in our interpretation of the world and participating in the period’s widespread analysis of the relationship between language and meaning, a subject he explored in his earliest writings, ‘Cinders’ (begun 1906-7) and ‘Notes on Language and Style’ (c. 1907). There he had observed that ‘Art creates beauty (not art copies the beauty in nature: beauty does not exist by itself in nature, waiting to be copied, only organised pieces of cinders)’ (CW, p. 42). Anticipating influential structuralist and conventionalist readings of the visual image, Hulme asserts that paintings, just like poems, are composed in a language, or ‘symbol system’ (Goodman, 1969, p. xii), that organizes the ‘cindery’ – the irreducibly plural, imperfect and chaotic – nature of reality into a unity the human consciousness can grasp (CW, pp. 9-10). Accordingly, when he refers to Whistler in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, it is to

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provide an example of the language with which ‘the modern’ reads the world: ‘We still perceive the mystery of things, but we perceive it in an entirely different way – no longer in the form of action, but as an impression, for example Whistler’s pictures’ (CW, p. 53). In ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, Hulme invokes Constable as the creator of a new language through which to see landscape: ‘Great painters are men in whom has originated a certain vision of things which has become or will become the vision of everybody . . . For instance the effect produced by Constable on the English and French Schools of landscape painting. Nobody before Constable saw things, or at any rate painted them, in that particular way’ (CW, p. 194). Binyon’s interpretation of Chinese painting as ‘seiz[ing] the universal in the particular’ is harnessed to the same end (CW, p. 196). These readings are, of course, informed by Hulme’s study of Bergson. Although Bergson ‘has not created any new theory of art’, wrote Hulme, ‘by the acute analysis of certain mental processes he has enabled us to state more definitely and with less distortion the qualities which we feel in art’ (CW, p. 191), that is, that ‘the essential element in the pleasure given us by a work of art lies in the feeling given us by this rare accomplishment of direct communication’ (CW, p. 203). This is the significance of Berenson’s characterization of the Florentine painters: his description of a painting as ‘life-communicating’ seems to Hulme to be ‘exactly what Bergson is getting at’ (CW, pp. 203-304).4 As these terms suggest, in this essay Hulme is less interested in individual works of art themselves than in the aesthetic emotion they produce, and indeed the beginning of the essay clearly states his belief in ‘an essentially aesthetic emotion’, which ‘as far as any investigation of aesthetics is concerned is the important thing’ (CW, p. 192). His plan for a book on ‘Modern Theories of Art’ is an ‘investigation of aesthetics’ of the same sort. The notes for chapter three state that a definition of the ‘specifically aesthetic emotion’ is ‘the problem of aesthetics and the one this book principally deals with’, though it also addresses ‘The entirely different enquiry – the psychology of artistic creation – what is the nature of mind characterised as creative imagination’. Hulme evidently wrote this plan after his enthusiasm for Bergson had begun to wane and his interest in German aesthetics had taken hold; although Bergson is allocated a chapter it concludes with the ‘Defects of the theory’, whereas Theodor Lipps, the major theorist of the doctrine of Einfühlung as a theory of art, is described as ‘the greatest writer on aesthetics’, and given two chapters (Hulme, 1924, pp. 262, 264). Hulme is concerned only with philosophical aesthetics in these writings and is conspicuously less interested in art history and art criticism; in his book plan he notes the first ‘defect’ of Bergson’s theory as ‘too much founded on analysis and experience of modern art’ (Hulme, 1924, p. 263). Nevertheless, his approach is broadly compatible with the expressivist criticism that his critical milieu had used to explain and categorize the new art. His definitions of art, like theirs, posit the art work as an expression of, and inspiration to, emotion, rather than as an object entirely distinct from artist and audience. But Hulme was beginning to find this approach untenable almost as soon as he had formulated it, and in a few months he would reject the very concept of ‘aesthetic emotion’, the basis of philosophical

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aesthetics, and commit himself to a formalist criticism grounded in the explication of individual works of modern art. This transformation is customarily explained as a corollary to Hulme’s growing interest in the views of Continental neo-classicists, most famously those of Action Française led by Pierre Lasserre and Charles Maurras, but also, according to the ‘German Chronicle’ Hulme had written in Germany in the autumn of 1913, those of the German neo-classicists, Samuel Lublinski and Paul Ernst, in whose ‘Die Stilarten in der Kunst’ (‘Varieties of Style in Art’) Hulme probably first encountered Riegl and Worringer (CW, p. 271; Ernst, 1928, pp. 301-11). As Miriam Hansen writes, ‘Worringer’s notion of a revival of the primitive instinct for the “Ding an sich” (which has come a long way from Kant), for the object isolated from its living context, supported Hulme’s aesthetic intentions without tying them to the Romantic premises of Bergson’s philosophy of intuition’ (1980, p. 372). But Hulme’s absorption of these Continental influences coincided with the rapid restructuring of the modern art scene in London: Hulme’s reading of Worringer was a catalyst, but by no means the only factor, in the reformulation of his writing about art.

‘The Great Difficulty in Any Talk about Art’ Where expressivist criticism was deployed inclusively, to suggest an underlying unity to the disparate artistic approaches that confronted the public around 1910, varieties of formalist criticism emerged as the different factions of artists and critics sought to define and assert the value of their individual style and allegiances. The distinctive critical vocabulary of Fry and Bell, for example, was developed as they sought to create a genealogy of modern art with Cézanne at its head, and it was consequently deeply indebted to Fry’s interpretation of Cézanne’s work. As Anna Gruetzner Robins has remarked, the ‘“geometric hardness” . . . that Fry said he saw’ in Cézanne’s painting was not only a response to the famous remark attributed to Cézanne, that ‘everything in nature models itself on the cone, the cylinder and the sphere’, but ‘also gave Cézanne’s paintings an authority that was prerequisite for pictures by an artist who Fry was determined should be acknowledged as the father of modern art. Fry was keen to break with the past and his earlier exposure to the Impressionist painting he regarded as “soft”’ (Robins, 1997, p. 24). Hulme shared both the vocabulary and the rationale: he would later marshal that attributed remark to claim Cézanne as part of the ‘tendency towards abstraction’ he traced through to the work of Picasso, Epstein, and to a lesser extent, Bomberg, Nevinson and the Vorticists, in order to combat Charles Ginner’s argument that Cézanne was a realist (CW, p. 291; Ginner, 1914, p. 272). Given the existence of such common genealogical denominators, debates about the legitimacy of the English descendents frequently turned on charges of lack of originality, or the use of ‘formulae’. In his first piece of art criticism, on Jacob Epstein’s exhibition at the Twenty-One Gallery, Hulme makes Epstein’s originality and modernity a central focus. But, as Robert Ferguson has discovered, Hulme’s first account of the exhibition was not the notorious ‘Mr. Epstein and the

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Critics’, but the unpublished, far more temperate, ‘Jacob Epstein at the 21 Gallery’ (Ferguson, 2003, p. 150). This initial venture into the field of art criticism has much in common with the later article, but it is instructive on its own account because it shows Hulme’s terms of approbation at an early and somewhat experimental stage. In arguing that Epstein’s drawings for future sculptures suggest that he has ‘passed through a more or less archaic period’ and ‘arrived at an entirely personal and modern method of expression’, Hulme describes the drawing Creation (c. 1913) as differing ‘very much from the more archaic flenite carving’: The figure is not a self enclosed entity, simple shut-off and independent but an endeavour is made to give it what, if the word were not so dangerous, might be called atmosphere . . . As the child is enclosed in the woman, so the woman herself is enclosed in certain enveloping shapes. In this way an endeavour is made to avoid the finitude of ordinary sculpture. I hesitate to use the word “atmosphere” to describe this effect, for it is a word which has too many associations with impressionism. There is nothing vague about this atmosphere, it is as rigid and definite as the figure itself. What makes this and the other drawings so interesting is that they show the possible line of development of a monumental art thoroughly modern, owing nothing to the monumental art of the past. It[s] principal characteristic will probably be this complicated, rather than simple, use of abstraction in form. (Hulme, 1913, pp. 3-[5])5

While Hulme is patently uneasy about his description of the drawing’s ‘atmosphere’, it is vital for his argument that he establish some difference of effect from ‘ordinary sculpture’ and Epstein’s archaic work, by which he means Female Figure in Flenite (1913) and Figure in Flenite (1913), on show at the exhibition, and also, presumably, Epstein’s most well-known work, the Tomb of Oscar Wilde (1909-12).6 Yet in the revised version of the article, Hulme wholly omits the distinction between Epstein’s ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’ periods (though he would include it in his later review of the London Group exhibition). In fact, the later version mounts a strong defense of the ‘use of formulæ taken from another civilisation’, arguing that the flenite carvings are not simply imitations of ‘Easter Island carvings’, indicating a ‘lack of individuality in the artist’, rather, they deploy a ‘constant and permanent alphabet’ as a ‘natural expression’ of the artist’s feeling (CW, pp. 256, 257). Here, then, we see Hulme deciding to reject the standard definitions of originality and to re-evaluate the very idea of using ‘formulae’. The cause of this change becomes clear in the course of the article, as Hulme brings forward his theory, suggested by Ernst’s essay, but only hinted at by Worringer himself, that the modern artist has an affinity with the archaic sensibility (Ernst, 1928, p. 311; Worringer, 1921, pp. 23-4; Worringer, 1997, p. 18). He had briefly introduced this idea in ‘Jacob Epstein at the 21 Gallery’, but it receives a more extended and personalized treatment in the published article, and is much more clearly directed towards combating criticisms of Epstein’s lack of originality: ‘I am moved by Byzantine mosaic, not because it is quaint or exotic, but because it expresses an attitude I agree with’, Hulme writes. ‘But the fate of the people who hold these views is to be found incomprehensible by the “progressives” and to be

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labelled reactionary; that is, while we arrive at such a Weltanschauung quite naturally, we are thought to be imitating the past’ (CW, p. 257). It is well known that Hulme’s first art criticism caused an uproar in the New Age. For several weeks, the correspondence pages condemned Hulme and, to a lesser extent, Epstein. But most of the complaints were about Hulme’s remarkably malicious attack on the journal’s resident art critic, Anthony Ludovici, rather than his particular argument in Epstein’s defence. One correspondent, Arthur Hight, did refer to it, but in such a way as to demonstrate that he had read Hulme as simply defending primitive art: ‘he ought were he consistent, to be squatting naked in Easter Island surrounded by the pre-historic Art he admires, and dieting himself on roots and toadstools after the manner of savages’, he wrote (1914, p. 319). The New Age’s editor, A. R. Orage, was more astute, but unsympathetic: ‘Mr. T. E. Hulme has constructed an imposing myth. We are to recognise primitive vision when we see it and to appreciate whatever has been constructed on a great order of society. Rigmarole, I say, rigmarole. One does not need a myth or even the prehistoric sense to appreciate and be “charmed” by simplicity wherever it appears’. Orage, however, found Epstein’s sculpture neither simple nor charming (‘R. H. C’, 1914, p. 307).7 Sickert also found Hulme’s criticism unnecessarily complicating and aligned it to a trend in criticism that he also associated with Roger Fry, deploring ‘Hulme and Bergson, and all incomprehensible bedevilments and obfuscations and convolutions and Rogerisms’ (1914a, p. 632). At the time, then, Hulme’s borrowings from Worringer made little positive impact. However, as a part of the philosophical gloss that Hulme cast over his art criticism, they were essential to its activity: it is the texts’ logical, or sometimes pseudo-logical, distinctions, their hard oppositions and their perplexing diagrams that constitute their rhetorical distinction from other criticism of modern art; for ultimately there is little difference in argument and vocabulary. It is characteristic that Hulme represents his defense of the primitive allusions in Epstein’s work as novel, but Post-Impressionism had in fact long been associated with primitivism; Desmond MacCarthy had written in 1910 of Gauguin’s endeavour to return to ‘the fundamental laws of abstract form’ that he found ‘characteristic of primitive art’ (1910, p. 11), and Fry too compared Post-Impressionist painting to primitive art, making precisely Hulme’s distinction: ‘most of the art here seen is neither naïve nor primitive. It is the work of highly civilised and modern men trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook’ (1912, p. 14). In the first instalment of his new series, ‘Modern Art’, Hulme effectively deployed his famous opposition between romanticism and classicism to denigrate ‘the pallid chalky blues, yellows and strawberry colours’ of ‘Mr. Fry and his group’, but this too was an opposition that had gained its currency in the service of the very group Hulme turned it against (CW, p. 264; Fry, 1912, p. 16). It was not only Hulme who struggled to move beyond the critical framework so influentially coined by Fry and Bell. On 1 January, in the issue of the New Age following that which carried ‘Mr. Epstein and the Critics’, Charles Ginner unleashed his manifesto for ‘Neo-Realism’, in which he attempted to categorize his own and Harold Gilman’s work against the main currents of Post-Impressionism.

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Ginner attacked both Cubism and the ‘Matisse-movement’ as formulaic applications of the work of Cézanne and Gauguin, respectively. Unlike these ‘Formula-machines’, Ginner wrote, ‘the aim of Neo-Realism is the plastic interpretation of Life through the intimate research into Nature’ (1914, pp. 271-2). Just over a month later, in the second ‘Modern Art’ article, Hulme responded to Ginner, defending the Cubist strain of Post-Impressionism, but this involved some alterations to his previous definitions. Where before he had stressed Epstein’s ‘genius and sincerity’, in ‘“extract[ing]” from reality new methods of expression’ (CW, pp. 258-9), Ginner’s appropriation of similar rhetoric forced Hulme to cultivate a more deliberate formalism and eschew his previously positive description of the ‘constant and permanent alphabet’ that ‘we must call formulæ’ (CW, p. 256). Now, only a month and a half later, he argued that ‘the new movement does not use formulæ, but abstractions, quite a different thing’ (CW, p. 287). It is at this moment that Hulme moves Worringer’s key word, abstraction, to a central place in his criticism, but this brought its own difficulties. For Worringer, abstraction was an attempt to simplify and individuate elements of an external world perceived as ‘verworren und unklar untereinander vermengt’ (‘confused and obscurely intermingled’), as he wrote, quoting Riegl (Worringer, 1921, p. 28; Worringer, 1997, p. 21). Hulme finds an equivalent simplification in ‘Cézanne’s treatment of trees’, but he predicts that ‘“the new tendency towards abstraction” will culminate, not so much in the simple geometrical forms found in archaic art, but in the more complicated ones associated in our minds with the idea of machinery’ (CW, pp. 292, 282). Although this emphasis was surely suggested by Epstein’s drawings for Rock Drill (1913), and by Lewis’s preface to the catalogue for the Brighton exhibition in which they first appeared, Epstein’s ‘ardour for machinery’ was by his own confession ‘short-lived’, and neither Epstein nor the Vorticists developed the type of abstract work Hulme envisaged (Lewis, 1913, pp. 10-12; Epstein, 1940, p. 70).8 The consequences of Hulme’s narrowing of his critical terms become apparent in his review of ‘The First Exhibition of Works by Members of The London Group’, held at the Goupil Gallery in March 1914. He provides a cursory survey of work by Gore, Gilman, Ginner and Bevan, concluding that it is ‘dissatisfying’ but ‘infinitely better than the faked stuff produced by Mr. Roger Fry and his friends’, before settling into an account of the ‘Cubist section’. But even here, hardly any of the work corresponds to Hulme’s by now highly specialized definition of modern art. Thus, although the paintings by Lewis, Wadsworth, Hamilton and Etchells are related to ‘the main movement’ which, ‘arising out of Cubism, is destined to create a new geometric and monumental art, making use of mechanical forms’, they use ‘abstractions for their own sake in a much more scattered way’, and are therefore only ‘a minor movement’, a ‘kind of romantic heresy’ (CW, pp. 294-5). Once again ‘the only really satisfying and complete work in this section is that of Mr. Epstein’ (CW, p. 297). By contrast, Fry, reviewing the same exhibition for the Nation, emerges as a far more robust supporter of what he calls the ‘newly-formed Futurist-Cubist group’; he praises ‘the clear and definite organizing power that lies behind’ Lewis’s works; is

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compelled by the ‘new plastic possibilities and a new kind of orchestration of color’ in Bomberg’s; and admires the ‘artistic sensibility’ and ‘spontaneous grace’ of the paintings by Frederick and Jessie Etchells (1914, pp. 998-9). By the time Hulme composed his final piece of art criticism, a review of ‘Works by David Bomberg’, the inadequacy of his critical vocabulary had become a focal point of the discussion. ‘An article about one man’s pictures is not a thing I should ever do naturally’, he remarks in the first paragraph. ‘The only absolutely honest and direct and straightforward word expression of what I think as I go round such an exhibition would be a monotonous repetition of the words “This is good or fairly good. How much does that cost?”’ (CW, p. 302). He describes at length the ‘little brass instrument’ he intends to design, which would ‘enable you to indicate at once all the complicated twists and relations of form that you perceive in a picture’, and ‘would do away with the art critic’ (CW, p. 304). This is not another Whistlerian argument for practitioner-based criticism, such as that launched against Hulme in the New Age by Sickert; Hulme even censures Bomberg’s preface to his own catalogue (Sickert, 1914b, p. 781; CW, pp. 303-5). What drives this turn against art criticism, against the use of a specialist language to describe art, is Hulme’s disagreement with the presupposition that form ‘produces a particular emotion different from the ordinary everyday emotions’. In a direct repudiation of the argument that had motivated his projected book on ‘Modern Theories of Art’, Hulme now states ‘there is no such thing as a specific aesthetic emotion, a peculiar kind of emotion produced by form alone’; indeed, ‘it could be shown that the emotions produced by abstract form are the ordinary human emotions – they are produced in a different way, that is all’ (CW, p. 306). While this argument has a certain consistency with Hulme’s anti-romanticism, its specific vocabulary and its occurrence at this particular moment suggest that the immediate target was Clive Bell’s Art, published five months earlier and reviewed extensively. In Art, Bell secured the vocabulary that had been so energetically tested and contested in the pages of British periodicals over the last four years for a definition of art grounded in ‘significant form’ and ‘aesthetic emotion’, and a history of art that, like Hulme’s, emphasized the pre-Renaissance, but which found its fulfilment in the work of ‘Cézanne, […] Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Rousseau, Picasso, de Vlaminck, Derain, Herbin, Marchand, Marquet, Bonnard, Duncan Grant, Maillol, Lewis, Kandinsky, Brancuzi, von Anrep, Roger Fry, Friesz, Goncharova, [and] L’Hote’, the canon promulgated by Fry’s PostImpressionist exhibitions, notably excluding the two British-based artists Hulme thought most important, Epstein and Bomberg (Bell, 1914, pp. 7-8, 200).9 The vocabulary of Hulme’s criticism, always uncomfortably indebted to that of Fry and Bell, was now more than ever attached to associations it had sought to resist. Despite its rhetoric to the contrary, we cannot look to Hulme for an art criticism uniquely responsive to a non-Bloomsbury, radical modernism. Hulme’s knowledge of art was largely formed by his interaction with the Impressionist, PostImpressionist and realist Fitzroy Street and Camden Town Groups, which had significant ideological sympathies with the Bloomsbury art groups. More importantly, his vocabulary, like that of most critics of modern art in the period,

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drew heavily on the early examples of Fry and Bell, and the violence of Hulme’s dissociations is testimony to that undesirable debt. His criticism, then, is something of a palimpsest: its surface emphasizes its personal and amateur approach, its arguments deflect attention towards a German art historian and French literary critics, but its substance, its perceptions of individual works of art, are inevitably refracted through an English Post-Impressionist lens. Consequently, it is less the individual formulations than the trajectory of Hulme’s criticism that makes it such a uniquely compelling record of early twentieth-century intellectual activity. As other contributors to this volume have noted, our reading of Hulme has been transformed by Michael Levenson’s and Karen Csengeri’s chronological reordering of Hulme’s writings; what once appeared an idiosyncratic collection of dogmatic, if insightful and eminently quotable, opinions, has been revealed as an emphatically engaged series of conversations with contemporaries, a display of the on-going competition to define and categorize an incipient aesthetic modernity, a demonstration of formulations tried out, rejected, and refined. This is a museum of modernism in the making. Literary modernism has always contained modernist art as a subtext, thanks largely to Hulme and to Ezra Pound. For both writers, thinking about visual art was a means of interrogating the modernist project’s core contradiction, its desire to represent modernity, despite the knowledge that modernity is, in Matei Calinescu’s phrase, ‘unrepeatable time’ (1987, p. 13). Their art criticism and the visual analogies of their literary criticism tell of a yearning for a modernity that can be grasped, and a realization that language cannot accomplish that task. As Andrew Thacker describes in this volume, ‘thinking through the issue of language’ was for Hulme, as for many of his contemporaries, an ‘attempt to think about the “new age” of modernity’, and the struggle for a vocabulary for art criticism is precisely a struggle with ‘the definitional problems involved in discussing modernity’ (p. 41). This nominalism, as Hulme knew, threatened the very possibility of a literary modernism, because it defined the verbal as secondary. Hulme’s response was constant revision: ‘you are compelled simply in order to be accurate to invent original ways of stating things’, he wrote (CW, p. 200). Did Hulme find a more satisfactory language for his lost foreword to the book on Epstein’s sculpture? The little we know of it gives scant information about its methodology or vocabulary. Hulme described it in a letter as ‘an essay on abstract sculpture’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 247); Epstein told him he would like it to be ‘as comprehensive as you can make it, and to dwell mostly on my abstract works and “plastic aims” in sculpture, referring to my realistic works as a beginning or foundation for the others’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 254); and, after Hulme’s death, Epstein described it as ‘a very careful and original statement of my aims in sculpture and an estimate of my achievement and it would have fulfilled for me what I have desired, a serious and non-journalistic account of my sculpture without any deferring to the taste of the editors or public’ (Ferguson, 2000, p. 271). While the absence of this essay is tantalizing, it is also, perhaps, appropriate that what we have come to imagine as Hulme’s most important work of art criticism should be wordless, the closest we have to a manuscript consisting only of the photographs of

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Epstein’s sculpture from which Hulme was working. For, ultimately, Hulme’s criticism is most instructive, and most typical of the period and of an emergent modernism, in the ambiguities of its engagement with the visual arts: its attraction to new forms of expression, its desire to categorize and appropriate, its frustration with the limits of its own language. It is less a confident explanation of a distinct new style than a series of inevitably compromised gestures towards a range of overlapping experiments just coming into view. As Hulme knew, it could have a ‘definite meaning’ for only a few years, or even a few months, ‘but even that very soon lapses into a fluid condition when it means anything and nothing’ (CW, p. 191).

Notes 1

At the same time, some former members of the Camden Town Group and the Fitzroy Street Group resigned or allowed their membership to lapse, including Grant, Augustus John, Pissaro and Sickert (Baron, 2000, pp. [14], 62-70). 2 Even though Gore, John, Pissaro, and Sickert were, or had been, members of the New English Art Club, and they, together with Bayes, Bevan, Gilman, Lightfoot and Manson had exhibited there (Baron, 2000, p. 41). 3 Lightfoot was the other non-Fitzroy Street circle artist invited to join the Camden Town Group. He had been a member of Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club (Baron, 2000, p. 45). 4 Hulme directs us to ‘the part of the book . . . where he explains the superiority of Giotto to Duccio’ (CW, p. 203). Hulme misremembers: Berenson’s comparison is between Giotto and Cimabue, and although Berenson deploys the term ‘life-communicating’ a number of times in the course of his book, it does not appear in his discussion of Giotto. Its sense is certainly implied, however, and the rest of Hulme’s paragraph, his description of the different intensity given to objects by artists and non-artists, is drawn directly from Berenson’s discussion of Giotto (Berenson, 1896, pp. 10, 67, 71). 5 The typescript of this review contains corrections in Hulme’s hand, but I have retained the crossed out ‘a self enclosed entity’ to preserve the sense of the sentence. I have however followed the rest of Hulme’s corrections, which, apart from the addition of the last sentence, consist of minor refinements to the phrasing. 6 Titles and dates of Epstein’s sculptures follow Silber. 7 Despite Ann Ardis’ important argument that the New Age’s ‘very unique political and aesthetic commitments to Guild Socialism . . . color the journal’s presentation of modernist visual and literary art quite strikingly – and often quite negatively’, Charles Ferrall makes a pertinent point when he observes that ‘Although Hulme’s advocacy of the art of the new industrial and technological era failed to impress his colleagues at the New Age, it nevertheless closely resembled their own support for the new militant unionism’ (Ardis, 2002, p. 145; Ferrall, 2001, p. 19). 8 See Rae, 1997, pp. 99-103, for a discussion of the ‘tense balance between abstraction and representation’ in Vorticist art (p. 101). 9 Hulme’s only explicit discussion of Art occurs in his ‘War Notes’, published in the New Age on 13 January 1916, when he sets it against Bell’s pacifist pamphlet Peace at Once (1916) (CW, pp. 374-6).

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Chapter 4

Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis Alan Munton

The Future T. E. Hulme was a man of the future. Everything in his thought is projected forwards. He anticipated a drastic change in western thought – nothing less than the end of the Renaissance consensus – and then looked about for evidence. This characteristically impetuous strategy led him to contemporary art, and specifically to the sculpture of Jacob Epstein and the painting and drawing of Wyndham Lewis. The following discussion works through what happened during the eight months in 1913 and 1914 when Hulme directed his restless intelligence upon the London art scene. Like any radical he looked forward to a change in ideas, and like any conservative he looked backwards for his principles. But Hulme did not look backwards to the expected past. His past was a very original place: Pelagius, Pico della Mirandola, Pascal and Proudhon are some of the figures to be found there. Most original of all was his commitment to Original Sin. In what follows, I begin with his theory of art and its bearing upon abstraction, move through an element of biography in order to raise questions about the future-directed nature of his thought, and conclude with a brief speculation as to what his future might have been had he not been killed at the age of thirty-four in a war that he supported.

Abjection Between December 1913 and July 1914, Hulme made six polemical interventions in the debate on contemporary art – five articles in the New Age and a lecture, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’. He also wrote five brief notes about particular drawings and the unpublished draft of a gallery review. What we do not have is Hulme’s study of the work of Jacob Epstein, ‘The Sculpture of Epstein’, which either died with him when he was struck by a shell in September 1917 (the accepted version) or was stolen from his property afterwards (Epstein’s paranoid version). Of this project there survives only a battered portfolio of photographs of

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Epstein’s work, annotated in Hulme’s hand. The hundred pages of typescript is another missing item in the patchy survivals of early British modernism.1 T. E. Hulme’s art criticism defines abstraction as it stood after Cézanne and Cubism, and then situates very recent developments within a theory of the future of western thought which he had already developed. Epstein’s sculpture was the contemporary work that mattered most. Yet Hulme seems to have realized that the sequence Cézanne/Cubism/Epstein was faulty. The book on Epstein took two years to write, perhaps because Hulme was troubled by the sculptor’s steady move away from abstract work towards (very fine) naturalistic portrait busts about which he had little or nothing to say. His passionate commitment to Epstein’s work at the turn of 1913-14 was more difficult to argue two years later, and indeed 1916 may have marked a turning point in Hulme’s estimation of Epstein. In that year Epstein was asked to make a sculpture of Admiral Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, who had been the force behind the Dreadnought battleships, and – palpably impressed by the aura of power – he began work within two hours of receiving the commission. Earlier that year Epstein made a notably unsuccessful head of Hulme himself. The sitter could not have been unaware that this representation lacked vitality and presence, let alone any touch of modernity.2 The edition of the head and bust of Admiral Lord Fisher, with or without arms, was a notable success. And Epstein gave it a patina.3 The artist Kate Lechmere, Hulme’s partner at this time, felt that Epstein’s abstract period occurred ‘directly under the influence of Hulme’s conversation and theories’, and the book on Epstein was to have been, in Hulme’s own words, ‘an essay on abstract sculpture’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 247), in which Rock Drill (191315) would surely have had a prominent place. The first version of this dramatic and aggressive work was completed by the end of 1913, and it was the machine associations that predominated when Epstein purchased an actual drill on which to mount his sculptured figure. This is consistent with Hulme’s theories, so it is a matter of some surprise that he has nothing to say about it. It is again surprising that in ‘Mr Epstein and the Critics’ of 25 December 1913, Hulme describes one of the two Rock Drill drawings then being shown at the 21 Gallery, but does not use it to develop his theory of the machine in art.4 Instead he explains the representational elements of the man-machine, pointing out that the lines of the tripod ‘continue the lines of his legs’. Hulme is much more interested by ‘the drawing called “Creation”, a baby seen within many folds’ (CW, p. 258). When Epstein exhibited the Rock Drill construction at the London Group in 1915, the work invaded gallery space in just the way that the idea of the machine had invaded the space of urban life and the consciousness of its inhabitants. If Rock Drill is Epstein’s most dramatic and most shocking contribution to English modernism, it was also a work whose radicalism he later talked down, evidently anxious that it might be described as abstract. ‘The Rock Drill is not entirely abstract’ is the first thing he wanted to say about it in the interviews he gave to Arnold Haskell between 1929 and 1931. It was ‘prophetic’ of the destructive impulses of the First World War and ‘has therefore very definite human associations’ (Haskell, 1931, p. 45). It is the Rock Drill of 1916, revised under the

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impact of the war, which Epstein refers to as ‘human’. In it the sexualized driller is brought down from his high place and becomes a broken torso, armless on one side, handless on the other, a ‘melancholy and defenceless’ figure now named Torso in Metal from the ‘Rock Drill’ (Cork, 1999, p. 40). The sexualized arrogance of the man-machine that represented new times, as Hulme understood them to be, is here made abject. Abjection recurs in this discussion both as the decline from arrogance or egotism (as here), and as part of a structure which I call the ‘abjection–resistance’ model. The latter summarizes what Hulme took from the theories of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, where the ‘spiritual dread of space’ (1997, p. 15) supposedly felt by primitive peoples is resisted by their art, which abstracts in order to find both tranquillity and ‘a refuge from appearances’ (1997, p. 16). Hulme valued Epstein’s work above any other in the modern movement, and after it, the work of Wyndham Lewis. For him, Epstein’s sculpture and drawings do two things: they reach back and inwards and are archaising and atavistic; and they ‘turn the organic into something hard and durable’ (CW, p. 284). Lewis’s work has a different psychological structure, one which attempts to reconcile opposites by setting them into relation with each other. This relational model generates an abstraction that engages with the contemporary urban environment, although (here I argue against the usual view) it has only a limited interest in machine forms. In contrast to Lewis’s ‘presentism’, Epstein rarely thought or worked as a contemporary, tending to attribute supreme meaning to the female form in pregnancy or at the moment of birth. This archaizing reductionism is challenged only once in his work, by Rock Drill. In ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, his brilliant future-oriented lecture of January 1914, Hulme speculates that the forms of the new geometric art will have complex associations with machinery. Puzzlingly – for the first version of Rock Drill was complete by the end of 1913 – Hulme does not integrate it into his argument at this point or later. In his autobiography Epstein is both vain and revisionist about Rock Drill. He stresses his own capacity for innovation while denying it to his Surrealist successors: ‘Actual movement is not novel either, for I had thought of attaching pneumatic power to my rock drill, and setting it in motion, thus completing every potentiality of form and movement in one single work’ (Epstein, 1963, p. 56). What could have been Vorticism’s Gesamtkunstwerk permitted ‘the discipline of simplification of forms, unity of design, and co-ordination of masses’, but was actually motivated by a false and childish excitement: ‘In our attempts to extend the range of sculpture we are led into extravagance and puerility’ (1963, p. 57). Epstein preferred the supposed intrinsic qualities – never adequately defined – that he believed characteristic of the best sculpture at all periods and in all places. Buried among these disavowals are important questions concerning abstraction, but they are not the same questions that Hulme raised in ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, where Epstein’s work is the chief exhibit. The new geometrical art whose significance Hulme affirmed on the basis of Byzantine mosaics and which he set against ‘vital’ Renaissance art, performs a predictive function: ‘the reemergence of geometrical art may be the precursor of the re-emergence of the

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corresponding attitude towards the world, and so, of the break up of the Renaissance humanistic attitude’ (CW, p. 269). Then: ‘Finally I recognised this geometrical character re-emerging in modern art. I am thinking particularly of certain pieces of sculpture I saw some years ago, of Mr Epstein’s’ (CW, p. 271). If ‘years’ is correct here, Hulme must mean the Tomb of Oscar Wilde of 1909-12, and if it is a slip for ‘months’, Rock Drill is again excluded as Hulme goes on to praise the drawings at the 21 Gallery exhibition connected with birth. A foetus is enclosed within the torso of the Rock Drill, offering a further opportunity to integrate this work into his theory. Hulme rejects a double opportunity to use Rock Drill as primary evidence towards his effort to overturn Renaissance thinking. Whilst Epstein abjured his own ‘progressive’ tendencies as extravagant and puerile, and redefined everything he did as naturalism, Hulme’s argument is oriented towards the future. He divides the modern movement ‘roughly’ into PostImpressionism and Analytical Cubism, which are transitional modes leading towards ‘a new constructive geometrical art’ that is ‘the only one containing possibilities of development’ (CW, p. 264). It is only then that Analytical Cubism can be put to work, ‘begin to be used’. Perceptively – given his distance from Paris – Hulme rejects the work and arguments deployed by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger in Du ‘Cubisme’ in 1912: ‘compare the work illustrated in Metzinger’s book on cubism with that of Mr Epstein and Mr Wyndham Lewis’ (CW, p. 282) he says, suggesting that sympathetic observers who can grasp the new art but cannot see where it might develop, would find in the work of the two London-based artists the way forward from Analytical Cubism. Hulme would have rejected the ‘Salon cubism’ of Gleizes and Metzinger on several grounds, not least for its Bergsonism (a philosophy he had rejected), and for the claim that their own work was ‘nothing less than a transcendental manifestation of “painting itself”’, as John Richardson puts it.5 You cannot move forward from ‘painting itself’. Although Hulme’s thought is projected towards the future, he was never an advocate of Futurism, which he regarded as ‘the deification of the flux, the last efflorescence of impressionism’ (CW, p. 277), and the opposite of what he was advocating. This was also, and later, Wyndham Lewis’s view: ‘Futurism, as preached by Marinetti, is largely Impressionism up-to-date’, he wrote in Blast in 1914 (1981a, p. 143). Lewis speaks of Hulme and himself ‘preferring something anti-naturalist and “abstract” to Nineteenth Century naturalism, in pictures and in statues’, not Rodin but ‘the more concentrated abstractions-from-nature of the Egyptians’. From Lewis’s remark that ‘we preferred a helmet to a head of hair’ (1937, p. 110), it is possible to extrapolate the growing divergence between Epstein and Hulme, for Epstein became extremely good at modelling the hair of his sitters but abandoned, for example, the helmet-shape of the 1907 bronze child’s head Romilly John, and the disturbing sense of threat generated by the masked head of Rock Drill.6 Lewis thought that ‘neither Gaudier nor Epstein would in the end have been “abstract” enough to satisfy the requirements of this obstinate abstractionist. He would have had to fall back on me’ (1937, p. 106). This is doubtful. Only a changed Hulme would have responded to the Lewis who wrote in 1915: ‘We must constantly strive to ENRICH abstraction till it is almost plain life’ (1981b, p. 40).

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Hulme disliked the survival of indications of process in abstract works, objecting to Lewis’s lost Christopher Columbus that ‘one form probably springs out of the preceding one as he works, instead of being conceived as part of a whole’. But the drawing ‘The Enemy of the Stars’ is ‘quite remarkable’ (CW, p. 296; illus. Edwards 2000a, p. 163), no doubt because it is an abstracted human form that looks like a sculpture. When Hulme says of an unspecified Lewis picture that ‘the artist’s only interest in the human body was in a few abstract mechanical relations perceived in it, the arm as a lever and so on’ (CW, p. 283), he has recognized only part of what Lewis was doing, whether in the Timon of Athens portfolio of 1912, or in such works as the Combat drawings of 1914.7 Representation of mechanism was not an end for Lewis, who was as much concerned to explore the psychological relation between figures within the work, and of the audience’s response before it, as he was interested in this simplified modernist motive. For Lewis ‘Machinery is the greatest Earth-medium’ (Lewis, 1981a, p. 39), but modernity is more complex than that, and is constituted by a new psychic relationship which puts the isolated ego under pressure. As he wrote in ‘The New Egos’ in 1914, ‘We all today . . . are in each others’ vitals – overlap, intersect, and are Siamese to any extent’. The ‘old form of egotism’ no longer fits contemporary circumstances, ‘so the isolated human figure of most ancient Art is an anachronism’ (1981a, p. 141). Lewis rejects Worringer here, and Hulme’s use of him. This in turn means a rejection of Epstein’s reliance upon archaic figures, and (Rock Drill apart) of his lack of interest in the new life of ‘dress, manners [and] mechanical inventions’ (1981a, p. 39) that the artist of 1914 should engage with. This is Lewis’s characteristic relational model, and it resists abjection before the new mechanical forces without taking Epstein’s turn towards archaism. Hulme retained the egoistic model, deriving it from his reading of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908), which he treats as a theory of abjection. Fearful ‘primitive’ peoples are faced by a confused, arbitrary and disordered world against which they assert themselves by creating ‘a certain abstract geometrical shape’ (CW, pp. 273-4), whilst Byzantine work intimates ‘what may be called, inaccurately, a kind of contempt for the world’ (CW, p. 277). This version of the abjection–resistance model permits Hulme to theorize Epstein’s work, but it is not adequate to Lewis’s complex strategies of relation with the contemporary world. This may explain why Hulme does not integrate Rock Drill into his high valuation of Epstein, and also why he could not endorse Lewis more fully. ‘Primitive’ fear and Byzantine contempt may differ, but they unite in generating an art that is separate from the world around it, rather than intimate with nature and the human, as in the ‘vital’ art of the Renaissance. In this respect, Hulme’s theory is confirmed by the detachment with which both Cubism and Vorticism treated their objects. Hulme did not believe that the new geometrical art would resemble archaic work, but it would surely be an art of separation. This detached attitude to the mechanization of the environment is inconsistent with the survival of ‘primitivism’ in the archaic phase of Epstein’s work between 1913 and 1917. How did Hulme

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reconcile an abject archaism with the new and aggressive mechanization? This raises the question of what abstraction meant at this time.

Abstraction Abstraction in early modernism is a consequence of two environments. One is the built urban environment of major cities, the other an environment tempting to the artist – the museum. Hulme regretted the way abstractions disappeared from the London streets: ‘the superb steel structures which form the skeletons of modern buildings, and whose gradual envelopment in a parasitic covering of stone is one of the daily tragedies to be witnessed in London streets’ (CW, p. 283). Muirhead Bone, later to organize support for Epstein when his public sculpture was attacked, made his reputation with etchings of buildings under construction at this time, for example The Great Gantry, Charing Cross Station (1906) and Interior of the British Museum Reading Room (1907).8 Epstein’s eighteen sculptures for the British Medical Association Building by Charles Holden on the corner of Agar Street and The Strand in London (1908-9) were part of this building activity. These heavily symbolic sculptures mark the bursting out of museum culture upon the urban environment. In its campaign against them, the Evening Standard newspaper demanded visual restraint in public spaces. The populist Father Bernard Vaughan SJ (blasted in Blast) objected ‘to such indecent and inartistic statuary being thrust upon my view in the public thoroughfare’9 or ‘flung before the public on the public highway’.10 The offence was to bring possibilities suggested by the museum into a moralized public sphere conceived as already replete. Epstein’s Tomb of Oscar Wilde in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris had as its museum source the Man-headed Bull of 721-705 BC from the Palace of Sargon at Khorsabad (Iraq), to be found in the British Museum (Silber, 1986, p. 22). Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, to some degree a protégé of Epstein, and evidently aware of this source, wrote in Blast 1 a history of past Vortices, in one of which ‘From Sargon to Amir-nasir-pal men built man-headed bulls in horizontal flight-walk’ (Lewis, 1981a, p. 156). The Wilde Tomb should have been read by the contemporary audience as transgressive, but it was not, perhaps because Epstein’s austere flying figure has a forward thrust – more than ‘flight-walk’ – that may be (mis)read as a forward movement embodying romantic notions of the aspiration of the soul. When Hulme saw it, Epstein reported, he ‘turned it into some theory of projectiles’, which we can be sure was not romantic, but was certainly forwardmoving (1960, pp. vii-viii). A critical reading may be found in Helen Saunders’s drawing The Rock Driller, where the figure ploughing up the land with his penisdrill has a block for a body and carries a cartoonish version of the head on the Wilde tomb, flat-faced and with a striated ‘Egyptian’ head-dress flowing behind.11 Museum culture was vulnerable to such satire, and in 1915 Lewis took a different view of Epstein’s historical argument about sculpture’s ‘fundamental qualities’. By all means look to the past for ‘fundamental excellence’, he wrote, but that quality must exist in the contemporary artist too, who ‘has no need to potter about

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Museums, especially as life supplies the rest, and is short’ (Lewis, 1981b, p. 39). By ‘life’ Lewis meant the environment in which the artist lived, and specifically the increasingly mechanized surroundings of the modern city. A necessary stay in Paris to oversee work on the Wilde monument in the Père Lachaise cemetery in the second half of 1912 led to Epstein becoming familiar with the ‘primitivism’ of the Parisian avant-garde, which was partly museumbased, and partly driven by the activities of enterprising dealers. He became familiar with the work of Amedeo Modigliani and Constantin Brancusi. The former was already working out of a limited range of African sculpture, whilst the latter’s three versions of The Kiss (1907, 1909, 1912) alerted Epstein to the erotic possibilities in direct carving (Silber, 1986, p. 25). The Venus that Hulme found so ‘solid’, together with other African-influenced work, would follow upon Epstein’s return to England in 1913. He began to collect African and Oceanic sculpture in Paris in 1912 or 1913, buying from the newly-established dealer Paul Guillaume (Epstein, 1963, p. 188).12 It was Guillaume who established both scholarly authority and economic dominance in the field; we might say that he turned the fetish into a commodity. Epstein eventually accumulated a particularly fine collection of figures and masks. There is a link between the Paris artists and Epstein, in that a Fang Figure from Gabon purchased by Derain at some date between 1906 and 1912 later passed into the collection of the ‘famously discriminating’ Epstein. That figure is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.13 Epstein first drew upon museum collections and then supplied their needs; when his own collection was dispersed after his death, works entered some eight major museums.14 Epstein’s disavowal of abstraction can be traced in the conversations with Haskell. ‘For a time the chief influence of Negro art was towards complete abstraction,’ he said, overstating the case the better to demolish it, ‘but its true influence should be to suggest new ways of interpreting nature’ (Haskell, 1931, p. 91). He even remarked: ‘I am not fond, as you know, of abstractions’ (1931, p. 106). In 1914 Hulme had vigorously opposed a Neo-Realist version of the naturalist argument made by the painter Charles Ginner, deploying an argument that he would surely later have used against Epstein. Ginner confused two statements, in Hulme’s view: ‘(1) that the source of imagination must be nature, and (2) the consequence illegitimately drawn from this, that the resulting work must be realistic, and based on natural forms’ (CW, p. 292). Picasso conducts research into nature ‘as far as the relation of planes is concerned’ far greater than any in realist painting. Hulme continues: ‘But in as far as the artist is creative, he is not bound down by the accidental relations of the elements actually found in nature, but extracts, distorts, and utilizes them as a means of expression, and not as a means of interpreting nature’ (CW, p. 293). This is a cogent account of what makes abstraction possible, but only certain abstractions, primarily those in the Cézanne–Cubism sequence. Neither Wassily Kandinsky nor Lewis would have thought it adequate. In the unpublished review of Epstein’s exhibition at the 21 Gallery, written in December 1913, Hulme divided Epstein’s work into three phases: ‘Starting from a

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very efficient realism, he passed through a more or less archaic period and . . . has now arrived at an entirely personal and modern method of expression’.15 The two ‘Carvings in Flenite’ come at the end of the archaic period, whilst the modern method occurs in the drawing of a pregnant woman, named as ‘Creation’ in ‘Mr. Epstein and the Critics’ (CW, p. 258) and likely to be the ‘Drawing’ reproduced in the first Blast (xv, opposite p. 120). Hulme describes this drawing: ‘As the child is enclosed in the woman, so the woman herself is enclosed in certain enveloping shapes’. The enveloping shapes, we can now say, are vaginal in structure. The most striking abstraction is of the neck, which is a long, arched curve bearing an enquiring head – this is, in fact, a preparatory drawing, not yet close to the final sculpture, for the ‘Female Figure in Flenite’ (Silber, 1986, p. 45).16 Hulme again argues that Epstein is ‘extracting’ new methods of expression from reality, ‘and that these being personally felt will inevitably lack prettiness’ (CW, p. 259). But where is the advocacy of the machine that we should now expect? In ‘Mr. Epstein and the Critics’ Hulme has only this to say of the Rock Drill drawings: ‘People will admire the “Rock Drill”, because they have no preconceived notion as to how the thing expressed by it should be expressed’ (CW, p. 258). This tells the readership how to interpret, without arguing that the mechanical is valid. The importance of this sculpture was instead asserted by the editor of the New Age, who filled the back page of the number in which Hulme defended Epstein with a dramatic reproduction of ‘The Rock-Drill’, a drawing showing the naked driller from the rear.17 When Hulme reviewed the work Epstein showed with the London Group in the New Age on 26 March 1914, the mechanical is not mentioned. Hulme takes phrases from his December 1913 review, saying of the ‘Female Figure in Flenite’ that ‘The archaic elements it contains are in no sense imitative. What has been taken from African or Polynesian work is the inevitable and permanent way of getting a certain effect’ (CW, p. 298). Geometric and mechanical art is mentioned earlier in the review, but those terms are not used to describe Epstein’s work. Yet Hulme’s defense of Epstein is not a defence of archaism. Contemporary archaism is a stage in becoming modern which a) shares characteristics with earlier geometric art – African statues for Epstein, Byzantine mosaics for Hulme – and b) has differing characteristics, specifically ‘its use of the complicated geometrical shapes akin to those used in machinery, instead of the simple abstractions of archaic art’ (Hulme, 1913, fol. 2-3). Discussing Epstein in his otherwise dismissive review of the Grafton Group show in January 1914, Hulme argues that the intensity of the new movement in art shares an intensity with archaic art, but will eventually go beyond it. This is the intensity required to achieve the massive task of the break-up of the Renaissance attitude, but it is not intrinsically or lastingly archaic. For any specific artist, ‘archaism it seems is at the beginning a help’, and ‘although it may afterwards be repudiated, it is an assistance in the construction of a new method of expression’ (CW, p. 266). The problem for Hulme’s advocacy of Epstein was that apart from Rock Drill the sculptor continued to do archaic work. As Lewis put it, in his drawings of late 1913 Epstein ‘finds in the machinery of procreation a dynamo to work the deep atavism of his spirit’ (Lewis, 1971, p. 57). Epstein’s atavism determined all his subsequent non-naturalistic work, such as

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Genesis (1929-30) and Adam (1938-9); it ran too deep to be shifted by the depredations of modernity. However detailed the research into sculptured planes, atavistic impulses tend to take an organic rather than a geometrical form. The requirements of Epstein’s spirit were endorsed by what he collected and by what he saw in museums. The choice was between new life on the streets and past life in the museums, and Epstein chose the latter. Rock Drill was exceptional, and in any case Hulme preferred the ‘birth’ work. Hence his difficulty in writing the Epstein book. The African work that Epstein admired had usually been torn from its context to serve collectors and museums in Western Europe. The removal of reliquary sculptures from the boxes or structures they guarded was, as Elizabeth Cowling has pointed out, ‘a form of desecration which made them look less like “fetishes” and more like “sculpture”’ (2002, p. 181). Epstein consistently interpreted them as sculpture. ‘African work’, Louis Golding reports Epstein as saying, ‘has certain important lessons to teach that go to the root of all sculpture. I have tried to absorb those lessons without working in the African idiom’ (Golding, 1935, p. 100). How, then, do we read the two Venus sculptures of 1913-16, important works that we notice Epstein was keen to keep out of the record in his conversations with Haskell? With their bent legs and stylized breasts, are they not ‘in the African idiom’? To interpret fetishes as sculptural objects is to locate abstraction as prior to all western practice. This view emerges from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, where the authors reinterpret Worringer, taking not the Egyptian rectilinear line as origin, but (as is usual in their work) finding a source in the pre-writing nomadic. Epstein’s collecting, and his practice, are consistent with the nomadic Africa of Deleuze and Guattari, as is Hulme’s theory of the archaic as a stage towards a contemporary abstraction that cuts out the Renaissance. Epstein’s two Venus sculptures can be understood within this complex of ideas. The sinuously rising white marble of these pregnant figures is a powerfully eroticized challenge to western expectations of the ‘classical’. Both have the ‘slowness’ that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to the nomadic. But it is the heads that matter most. When the smaller version is viewed from the side the abruptly descending snout amounts to an almost comically ineffectual proboscis, but viewed from the front an allusion to the long flat head of the Rock Drill torso is detectable. In the second version, which is altogether more dignified, the flat wide nose, or front of the face, drops more steeply from the top of the head and has a straighter and firmer jaw-line, so that the effect is now imposing. If the head of Rock Drill was influenced by the African monkey masks of the Baule tribe of the Ivory Coast, as has been suggested, and if in 1913 the first Venus preceded the first Rock Drill, then the Rock Drill head is a dramatic mechanization of the African and of the erotic.18 Epstein’s cross-cultural strategies in these three works develop a practice of abstraction that is at once contemporary and archaic. The moment holds only briefly (1913-16), but it marks a very significant achievement located beyond the limits of bourgeois humanism. The titles given to the Venus sculptures are directed satirically at western ‘classical’ values, but the works themselves are neither

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wholly western nor wholly ‘nomadic’. Again Deleuze and Guattari offer the terms for interpretation, though ‘pure animality’ is too strong to describe Epstein’s work, even at this period. They write: ‘It is precisely because pure animality is experienced as inorganic . . . that it can combine so well with abstraction, and even combine the slowness or heaviness of a matter with the extreme speed of a line that has become entirely spiritual’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 499). Epstein’s Venus carvings are indeed ‘slow’, or as Hulme put it, ‘In Mr. Epstein’s work the abstractions have been got at gradually’ (CW, p. 309). Yet they are delineated with a swiftness of conception that unites the animality of the heads with the erotic and generative bodies. Deleuze and Guattari endorse the view of Leroi Gurhan that ‘art is abstract from the outset and could not be otherwise at its origin’ (1987, p. 497). Neither Epstein, Lewis nor Hulme would have contested this. Hulme, indeed, in his struggle against the vital art of the Renaissance, would have been satisfied to read John Rajchman’s inference from A Thousand Plateaus that ‘classical European illusionism is thus only a late development in an inherently abstract art’; for these early British modernists, abstraction was not a subtraction, not a removal of attributes or ‘the result of stripping illusionist space bare’, but ‘something that comes first’, in Rajchman’s words (1995, p. 21). In Worringer’s terms, the history of sculpture is the story of the journey away from abstraction towards ‘a compromise between the urge to abstraction and the very necessity of reproducing the natural model’ (Worringer, 1997, pp. 86-7). Hulme’s description of Epstein’s ‘Creation’ and other drawings for sculpture exhibited in 1913 confirms Worringer’s words: ‘The tendency to abstraction, the desire to turn the organic into something hard and durable, is here at work’ upon material more complicated than ‘the more archaic work’. Epstein’s material is birth, and ‘generation’, the very essence of the organic, ‘has been turned into something as hard and durable as a geometrical figure itself’ (CW, p. 284). Rock Drill is forgotten. The archaic has been modernized, the organic transformed, and an idea has been made solid. This is Hulme’s final account of Epstein’s modernity. When Lewis wrote in 1950 that ‘the Greeks of antiquity were, with their naturalism, fastening upon Europe for 2000 years a theory of art which is radically mistaken’, a ‘vitalist mistake’ indeed, he is still using the terms set by Hulme’s reading of Worringer (1963, p. 529).19 He admires Epstein’s head of Einstein, for ‘such naturalism as that no one can fail to admire’, but insists on his wider purpose – ‘I was speaking of the principles shaping our culture’ (1963, p. 533) – and goes on to condemn western naturalism and endorse instead the Chinese version. A structure or sequence is in place here. Deleuze and Guattari deplore ‘the Egyptian rectilinear line, the Assyrian (or Greek) organic line, [and] the supraphenomenal, encompassing Chinese line’ for converting the abstract (nomadic) line into the organic, but they cannot deny that each of these remained contemporaneous with the abstract line and that together ‘there is reciprocal interaction, influence and confrontation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 497) with the organic impulse. Those relationships constitute precisely the history of abstraction as Hulme, Epstein, Lewis and Gaudier understood it.

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Hulme ceased publishing art criticism in mid-1914, leaving Lewis to sum up – and to look towards the future. Lewis concludes ‘A Review of Contemporary Art’ (1915) by projecting the future of abstraction. ‘There have been so far in European painting Portrait, Landscape, Genre, Still-life’, he wrote, and because ‘the Abstract’ has ‘already justified its existence’, it must ‘influence, and mingle with’ its four predecessors (1981b, p. 46). As we now know, this ‘extremely moderate claim’ (1981b, p. 46) turned out to be true of British and much European practice between the wars, and would be challenged only after the Second World War in the United States, and then in dramatic terms that would owe nothing to either primitivism or the machine. Only at that late date do practitioners decisively abandon Hulme’s theorization of the abstract.

Appetite Hulme asserted that belief in God should be ‘fixed and true’ for everyone, and was parallel ‘to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities’ (CW, p. 61), and Wyndham Lewis, though less keen on God, agreed.20 The incursion of appetite permits a consideration of the question of Otherness as it was understood by Hulme and by Lewis. Both T. E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis loved Kate Lechmere. Kate Lechmere loved T. E. Hulme, and financed Lewis’s Rebel Art Centre, doing both in 1914. The mode of affection of each man can be judged from their letters to her. Here is Lewis, perhaps writing at the time of their brief affair in 1912. There has been a muddle about a meeting at Earl’s Court underground station, and Lewis returns home to Greek Street to write to her: Dearest Jacques! A certain ambiguity in your letter…was cause of my missing tonight. For no doubt you did not get my letter at Earl’s Court, making tube rendezvous. I waited till ten to eight, hoping at last to see Your Jacquiness bursting bird-like out of the cage-elevator, but to no purpose. Tomorrow I seriously seek a roof. [Arrangements for tea next day.] 40 billion kisses! Passing beyond the Sesame of your lips. Embrassade. Bien, bien a toi! WLewis21

Lewis addresses Lechmere as ‘Jacques’ because when he first met her she was reading Rousseau’s Émile. ‘Your Jacquiness’ suggests that she has identity, self, and a compatible Otherness into which his comically excessive number of kisses enters bodily, while at the same time (‘Bien, bien a [sic] toi’) he wishes her well. Compare Hulme’s erotic letters to her, pencilled and scarcely legible:

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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism Dear K. D. I liked your letter immensely. Do write to me by return again like that. I like anything that makes sex seem solid just as I like heavy pieces of sculpture which make fugitive things seem fixed. Your letter made sex seem solid because it was frank and healthy interest in the possession of your C [sic]. That’s good. Solid and exciting. I feel like that too. I like Epstein’s statue with the C. like a pillar and I like to think of the knuckleduster for the same reason. It fixes our sex in a solid way. [ . . . ] Of course I came before I got to the end of the letter. (Ferguson, 2002, pp. 262-3)

‘K. D.’ means knuckleduster. Each called the other this, and – as is well-known – Hulme carried one in his pocket. On the occasion when Kate Lechmere made a dismissive remark about the Fall, Hulme ‘took Gaudier’s little toy out of his trouser pocket and “once again my buttocks were severely attacked by Hulme and his K. D. and the safest thing was to encourage Hulme’s kisses”’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 180). As Robert Ferguson explains in his biography of Hulme, Lechmere had not realized how significant to him was the doctrine of Original Sin. Nor is it probable that as an advanced painter, a reader of Rousseau and of the Russian novelists recommended by Lewis, she would take this concept seriously: so the deflecting ‘feminine’ strategy of kisses is called for. In Lewis’s exuberant letter the act of reading Rousseau belongs to her, and contributes to her vitality (though ‘your Jacquiness’ remains virtual because the message went astray, fulfilling a classic narrative trope), whilst the letter as a whole implies that a mutual regard exists between them. Hulme is different. He commends Lechmere’s efforts to please him by working upon her own body and writing about it. In the act of writing the fugitive sexual feeling becomes ‘solid’, but that writing itself provokes yet more fugitive feeling as Hulme comes while reading. The knuckleduster merges with the firm-pillared vagina that Epstein has cut by direct carving, and later in the letter Lechmere is attributed a pillar of her own: ‘I want the soft sucking sponge all round the pillar now’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 263). Lechmere became concerned as to whether Hulme really wanted her, to which he replied: ‘Of course I feel very friendly to you apart from sex, but sex makes the thing burn’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 264). Hulme does not recognize her as an Other in possession of a significant presence, as Lewis had done. The convergence between Kate Lechmere’s body and the sculpture of Epstein is intended to solve an aesthetic problem that is also a problem of authority: what language can be found to justify to a wider audience the fixing of fugitive feeling in modernist sculpture? The thing must somehow get said, but all too clearly the language and transitions of his letters to Kate Lechmere were not a possible public discourse. We see here the personal impulse behind Hulme’s idea that in Epstein’s ‘Creation’ a fugitive concept – ‘generation’ – has become solid. The Epstein statue ‘with the C. like a pillar’ is the first version of Venus, dating from 1913. The pubic region has been carved as a vertical area which does not recede but extends to the inside of the thigh on each side, and into this the vagina is a firmly-scored incision. To describe the entire area as a ‘pillar’ makes flesh architectural, and fulfils Hulme’s intention of finding a language to make solid

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what would ordinarily be evanescent, fugitive or contingent.22 But the impulse here is too personal, and demands a wider context. The word ‘solid’ performs significant work in ‘Notes on Language and Style’ of about 1907, where Hulme writes that ‘All emotion depends on real solid vision or sound. It is physical’ (CW, p. 24). The term recurs in ‘Cinders’ (1906-7 and later), in a mode applicable to sculpture, where Hulme seeks an alternative to the commonplace metaphor that the wind represents spirit. The choice lies between spirit as something fluid and the concept ‘that thinks of a man as an elaborately built-up pyramid, a constructed elaboration, easily upset and not flexible, only functioning in one direction, the one in which he was made’. It follows that there are ‘two world philosophies’ – either ‘I. Flexible essence’ or ‘II. Built up stuff’ (CW, p. 17). Hulme will become subtler than this, but the dualism of his thought, and the image of ‘man’ as a solid forward-moving construction working with ‘built-up stuff’, is established here. Hulme thought of philosophy not as the sum of questions occurring within the world conceived a priori as a unity, but as questions arising from human existence in the world, and specifically from existence understood as a relation between a proposition and the response to it. He uses the image of a theatre and its audience, with ‘words of heroism’ spoken from the stage, the ‘husbands’ in the audience applauding (what play is this?). ‘All philosophies are subordinate to this’, he writes – subordinate, that is, to a material relationship (which may be a kind of call and response, the claim of art and the critical reply) prior to any monistic or idealizing conception. Hulme prepares his next move by defining humans as animals. Because ‘human animals’ exist, it is a question ‘of philosophies as an elaboration of their appetites’ (CW, p. 14). Intellectual purpose is an elaboration of personal impulse, as in the Lechmere letters and the Epstein criticism. ‘Never think in a book’ is thus Hulme’s advice, by which he means ‘Do not think as books alone allow’. After he met Epstein in 1913 it became possible to think through sculpture and with the body. The ‘solid’ is a working concept that legitimizes Epstein’s sculpture, and will ensure the authority of Epstein’s critic. Lewis too theorized sexuality as the basis of a materialist philosophy. This occurs significantly later, in a clattering satirical poem published in 1933. OneWay Song celebrates our human movement forwards through time, and deplores any tendency to look back, or to blur our understanding of the present by mixing up different times. ‘Sex’, Lewis declares, ‘is of the same clay as Time!’ because ‘both are in their essence but One-Way’: ‘Time is the one-way dimension: sex its tart/ And subtle biological counterpart.’ Men and women come together in a ‘oneway motion’ (1979, p. 72): ‘Which drives it on at its sex-opposite/ At rest when in contact, if it’s a glove-tight fit/ Thereby to compose that two backed beast. . . . The two fronts disappearing in the smack’ (1979, pp. 72-3). But the ‘intense merging of our flesh’ makes only a ‘relative hermaphrodite’, so that when the two halves separate, human identity is established again:

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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism Each creature keeps his front, which is his sex, The hollow frontage, the one-way index. No creature but retains his vis-à-vis Chopped-off façade, productive of Thee and Me, Meum and tuum of the far-reaching plan Which causes us to become man and woman. (1979, p. 73)

This is a critique of Plato’s hermaphrodite theory of lost unity – split off from our other half, we seek it always. A ‘relative’ hermaphrodite is a temporary one, one that never loses the vis à vis, the façade that permits a sense of the Other, and then allows each to return securely to its own self. Once they get unstuck, Lewis’s men and women lie back secure in their separate selves. In ‘Thee and Me’ there is no merging. Lewis invents Lechmere within culture (the significant act of reading radical Rousseau in 1912), but leaves her free to be an admired Other separate from himself. Hulme subsumes Lechmere in his driven need to find meaning and authority by merging personal impulse (‘appetite’) with an intellectual purpose. Hulme’s purpose was to identify the art work that best expressed its own time in a way that was also evidence for a major change in world-view. Both Hulme and Lewis look towards the future. Or rather, for both the only possible direction is forward, because – in time or out of it – that is what our bodies and minds make us do. This involves Hulme in difficulties. He banishes the Renaissance because it embodied progress, and then permits the return of forward-moving time through another, Epsteinian, route. In ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, Hulme justified his praise of Lewis and Epstein in predictive, world-altering terms: ‘[T]his, whether you like it or not, is the character of the art that is coming. I speak of it myself with enthusiasm . . . because I believe it to be the precursor of a much wider change in philosophy and general outlook on the world’ (CW, p. 285). When it was all over, Lewis said of himself, Hulme, Joyce, Pound and Eliot that ‘We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized’ (1937, p. 258). The war not only destroyed Hulme’s body, it put paid as well to the future he had imagined. Lewis remained, to lament the deflection of the early modernist enterprise and at the same time to remind us that this work was done in a time unshadowed by war when everything seemed possible. It is not easy now to reconstruct the future as it must have appeared as Epstein completed Rock Drill in December 1913, Hulme lectured in January 1914, or Lewis published Blast in June 1914. We should remember that over the long term it was our future too.

Original Sin Lewis diverges most significantly from Hulme over Original Sin. In Blasting & Bombardiering he gives an ironic and playfully pedantic account of what the phrase means, and leaves the impression that it was an aberration that could do little useful work in criticism. In the more serious discussion in Men Without Art

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(1934) Lewis dismisses Original Sin as either unimportant or non-existent: ‘Is it an instinct at all? I hope not, for I have not got it’ (1987, p. 168). Lewis has two discussions, one on T. S. Eliot’s Christianity, in which Hulme is not mentioned, and another on Hulme’s distinction between romanticism and classicism. Since Lewis’s arguments on such questions are now being taken seriously, as once they were not, his objections to Original Sin demand attention. Hulme believed that man is ‘intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent’ (CW, p. 61), a view that Lewis says he is ‘in complete agreement’ with: ‘man is a static animal, needing a great deal of polishing up to appear at his best’ (1987, p. 167). The polishing metaphor is scarcely a robust assertion of intrinsic evil, and we soon begin to notice that Lewis is chipping away at the hard outlines of Hulme’s belief. In the Eliot essay Lewis argues, with some irony, that the doctrine of Original Sin – by which Christianity ‘literally stands or falls’ – is likely to lead a believer to exaggerate his or her propensity to sin in an effort ‘to prove the Fall, as it were, and tearfully to invite the graces of the Atonement’ (1987, p. 73). The worse the person, the better for God; this is justification through self-humiliation, abjection as a religious practice, the transition from a more or less reasonable religious humility to the humiliation required by the secular state. Nor is it obvious to Lewis that people are intrinsically evil. In an effort to imagine a ‘less exaggerated and medieval view of our depravity’, Lewis invokes the arctic travels of the explorer Vilhjàlmar Stefänsson among Eskimo communities more peaceful and virtuous than New York at the same time (1987, p. 74). Imagine a duality, Lewis urges – Rousseau against Christianity, the naturally good person set against the ‘miserable sinner’, and realize that the latter may be extrapolated into specious theories of the ‘intrinsic’ evil of the masses, or into a politically-useful belief in mankind’s ‘essential’ violence when wars are to be conducted. Lewis persistently qualifies Hulme, dissolving the clear-cut assertions of his ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, and converting them into psychological binaries concerning self-assertion and submission. The doctrine of Original Sin violated certain beliefs that Lewis held about what it is to possess identity. In the Eliot discussion we find his own belief about personality, self and identity – ‘that “the man, the personality” should exaggerate, a little artificially, perhaps, his beliefs’ so that ‘the man is thus “most himself” (even if a little too much himself to be the perfect self, on occasion)’ (1987, p. 75). Such a self can admit imperfection without self-humiliation. When Lewis turns to address Hulme directly in the essay ‘The Terms “Classical” and “Romantic”’, we find him skeptical of Original Sin. Whatever the dominant ethic may be at any time, whether puritan or more relaxed, human beings are largely orderly and accept instruction in not lying, stealing or killing, cities are peaceable, and people scarcely need ‘inner-check’ controls. Lewis appears distinctly uneasy with Hulme’s doctrine, yet reasserts it (1987, p. 170). Then, in a final turn he seems to make up his mind. From the French literary critic and Catholic convert Ferdinand Brunetière (1849-1906) he cites a particularly brutal version of the argument that man is intrinsically evil, which urges ‘Let us . . .

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destroy in ourselves, if we can – or at least to mortify – this “will to live” whose egoistic manifestations . . . make life so burdensome’.23 This self-humiliation or ‘ascetic self-mortification’ as Lewis justly describes it, is readily assimilated to Christian mysticism, so that Hulme’s classicism and its associated theological orthodoxy would lead to ‘as it were an arrogant asceticism, and an overmastering contempt for human life’ (1987, p. 171). Grounding himself firmly in this world, Lewis chooses the libertarian path, and Hulme is rejected, firmly and at last, in terms of the future envisaged by his words. Abjection is repudiated.

Speculations What might have been Hulme’s future? He wanted to do philosophy, from about his fortieth year, in order to challenge his own prejudices (Ferguson, 2002, p. 274). This sounds like Proudhon (who worked upon his own thought in this way) and would have led, surely, to a softening of his dualism and his dogmatism. The projected ‘Critique of Satisfaction’ (CW, pp. 427ff.) would have engaged with what satisfied other thinkers, but not Hulme, and is consistent with the theory of ideology towards which he was moving by the end of his life. What political direction might Hulme have taken? Bertrand Russell, moralizing against a former opponent, thought him an ‘evil man who could have created nothing but evil’, and have ‘wound up an Oswald Mosley type’; this was something that Epstein (surely rightly) rejected, defining him as ‘a conservative, but not a Fascist’ who ‘couldn’t have endured a fool like Mosley’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 242). Hulme’s opponent in the Epstein controversy was Anthony M. Ludovici, who became a non-Mosleyite fascist, and was arrested and interrogated – though not interned – during the Second World War (Stone, 2003, pp. 341-2). A clue to Hulme’s future may lie in his close but barely-documented friendship with the Spanish journalist Ramiro de Maeztu, who worked in London from 1905 to 1919 and attended the Tuesday meetings at Frith Street. When Hulme died, Kate Lechmere received from him a note assuring her that he was very nearly a Catholic, a tendency nobody else had observed. Maeztu wrote: ‘He was on the way (to) reconstructing his religious philosophy. His difficulties were many, and great his anguish but I believe that in essentials he was already a Catholic, although not in a ritualistic sense, but in the spiritual’ (Jones, 1960, p. 142). This does not sound secure. Ramiro de Maeztu y Whitney remains a puzzling figure. A Basque with an English mother, he was a member of the ‘Generation of 1898’ who fell out with its most prominent members, Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno. In London he was first attracted by Fabianism and then by the Guild Socialism of A. R. Orage, editor of the New Age, for which he wrote frequently. In his political writings, collected as Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of War in 1916, he acknowledges a debt to Hulme for ‘the political and social transcendency of the doctrine of original sin’ (de Maeztu, 1916, p. 5).24 He even wrote on art at this period, and his ‘Expressionism’ of 27 November 1913 contains a disparaging

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evocation of Lewis’s important lost painting Kermesse as resembling lobsters. Maeztu constructs a perverse argument around this work. Lewis and the Cubists are on the right track in refusing to paint things as they are, but ‘things in nature’ should be painted as ‘spiritual symbols’ – and Lewis does indeed want to paint the spirit of a fair, or Kermesse, and is in that respect the idealist required by the argument. But since Lewis’s painting does not resemble a real Kermesse, it cannot therefore represent the spirit of a Kermesse! (Maeztu, 1913, p. 122). If Maeztu got the politics of original sin from Hulme, he did not learn very much about art. After his return to Spain he was one of the few intellectuals to support Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship of 1923-30, and became an advocate of hispanidad. In 1930 he founded the review Acción Española, which propagated right-wing ideas on the model of Charles Maurras’s Action Française (Hennessey, 2000). As late as 1933 he declared himself as politically of the centre, but Hugh Thomas, though describing him as ‘almost a fascist’, locates him as an authoritarian monarchist who had a considerable influence on Franco (Thomas, 1977, pp. 59 and 947). Maeztu was shot by republicans in the Modelo prison in Madrid in October or November 1936, perhaps in revenge for the assassination of García Lorca. Maeztu believed himself to be influenced by Guild Socialism when it was apparent to everybody else that he was firmly on the right. During a 1927 interview with Giménez Caballero, who thought him a Blackshirt (‘un camisa negra’), Maeztu showed off a 1922 study of Guild Socialism that emphasized his influence on the concept and linked his thought to that of G. D. H. Cole, J. A. Hobson and R. H. Tawney, a group of British liberals and socialists.25 He seems to have been unaware of his true political position, even as he travelled far to the right. This is not uncommon. A sympathiser’s account of Maeztu in June 1936, shortly before his arrest, finds him in the grounds of the Real Sitio palace at La Granja near Segovia, among the magnificent fountains and statues, saying: ‘We don’t have the Escorial here! This is the French eighteenth century. Versailles. Nymphs. Shepherds. Brotherhood. Naturalism. But there is no God here. These adornments show the mental outlook reflected by Rousseau, which culminated in the slaughter of the Convention and the Terror.’26 In this extravagant reading of the environment (and with the final invocation of Rousseau in this essay), Maeztu’s ideology-critique from the right attempts to bring down in one gesture huge tracts of history and culture. It is a strategy learned from Hulme, but vulgarized by religious extremism. Would Hulme have got stuck like this, lacking the self-awareness to remake himself in the new and difficult conditions that followed the war? Or would he have gone on changing, reinterpreting the post-war world with provocative force and energy? The future that he might have worked out for himself deserves at least a moment of sympathetic consideration. * This chapter is part of a research project supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (BFF 2002-02842), the Comunidad Autónoma of La Rioja (ANGI-2002/05), and the University of La Rioja, Logroño, Spain (API-02 – 35).

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Notes 1

See Robert Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme, chapter 14, and pp. 271-2. ‘A book he had written on my sculpture . . . disappeared from his effects, and has never turned up’ (Epstein, 1940, p. 61). 2 Evelyn Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein, number 69, illustration on p. 138. 3 Jacob Epstein, ‘“How I Sculptured Lord Fisher”’, no pagination, Tate Archive. ‘The descendants of the men who are now making more secure the foundations of the Empire and ridding Europe of the greatest peril that ever menaced civilization will, I hope, gaze upon this bust with awe and reverence as that of the man who did as much as any man to save Britain. . . . Sculpturally speaking, Lord Fisher’s head is the most powerful I have ever done. . . . It is the head of a man of tremendous power.’ 4 Hulme discusses viewer response but not content or meaning (CW, p. 258). For date of completion, Richard Cork quotes from an unpublished draft letter of 1957 from David Bomberg to William Roberts. See Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art: Volume 2, p. 467 and p. 563, notes 19 and 20. Three Rock Drill drawings were on show in two exhibitions at the end of 1913. The third was in the ‘Cubist Room’ section of English Post-Impressionists and Others at Brighton. The New Age reproduction may have been a fourth. 5 ‘I also exclude certain elements of cubism, what I might call analytical cubism – the theories about interpenetration which you get in Metzinger for example’ (CW, p. 278). For an account of the scathing attitude of Picasso and Braque towards the Du ‘Cubisme’ selfpublicists, see Richardson, A Life of Picasso: Volume 2: 1907-1917, p. 215. 6 Romilly John, in Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein, number 8, illustration p. 120; Rock Drill, in Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein, number 53, illustration p. 135 and plate 12. The helmetshaped head returns in 1915 in Iris Beerbohm Tree (Silber, p. 60). 7 Lewis, Timon of Athens portfolio published 1913, work executed 1912. Combat No. 2 (M 161) and Combat No. 2 (M 162); see Edwards 2000, p. 136. 8 See Sylvester Bone, ‘Muirhead Bone and the Society of XII’, figures 1-3, p. 67. 9 Epstein, Epstein, p. 240, quoting the Evening Standard of 23 June 1908. See note 1. 10 Daily Telegraph, 26 June 1908, no pagination, Tate Archive. 11 Paul Edwards (ed.), BLAST: Vorticism 1914-1918, p. 72, figure 62. 12 ‘According to his correspondence with John Quinn, Epstein began buying African sculpture at least as early as February 1913’. Richard Cork, Jacob Epstein, p. 77, note 7. Bassani and McLeod (1987) survey Epstein’s activity as a collector. 13 Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso, p. 191, illustrated figure 161. 14 As at 1987. See Bassani and McLeod, note 5. 15 T. E. Hulme, ‘Jacob Epstein at the 21 Gallery’, unpublished typescript with manuscript corrections, Tate Archive 8135.35, fol. 1. The ms is in an envelope endorsed in Lewis’s late hand ‘T. E. Hulme article, or lecture, about Epstein’. If Hulme gave Lewis this review for Blast, the widespread assumption that Hulme was never intended to be a contributor is undermined. Perhaps too slight for Blast, it was in any case cannibalized for the 26 March 1914 London Group review. The falling-out between Hulme and Lewis occurred after 12 June 1914 (when they were part of the group at the Doré Gallery heckling Marinetti), too late to affect the contents of Blast, already set in type. 16 Richard Cork entitles a closely related drawing ‘Study for Female Figure in Flenite’ in the exhibition catalogue Jacob Epstein: The Rock Drill Period, pp. 38-9. Cork notes that in the Epstein portfolio (Keele University Library), Hulme captions this as ‘“Birth” drawing’ (p. 14, n. 21). If it is a study for the sculpture, Hulme’s distinction between archaic Epstein and his modern ‘birth’ work breaks down.

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Jacob Epstein, ‘The Rock-Drill’, p. 256. Alan Wilkinson, ‘Paris and London: Modigliani, Lipchitz, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska’, pp. 438-9. 19 Lewis was art critic of the BBC’s cultural and political weekly The Listener. 20 Lewis agrees in Men Without Art, p. 168, accepting the Deity but not original sin. 21 ‘Mystery Letter Discovered’, Lewisletter 21, p. 1. ‘Une embrassade’: hugging and kissing. 22 Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein, number 49 and plate 8 for a front view. This version is about four feet (123.2 cm) high. Dated 1913 by Silber. The second Venus is illustrated from the front in Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art: Volume 2, p. 459. In this version (The Sculpture of Epstein, p. 56) which is eight feet (244 cm) high, the pudenda are concealed within the thrust-forward thighs and legs. Cork’s suggestion that the two works ‘may even have been executed concurrently’ (p. 456) is perhaps confirmed by the catalogue appendix to Haskell where ‘Venus (1 and 2)’ are situated in 1917 with the note ‘(Marble commenced 1914. Height 8 feet)’, (p. 173). The Venus statues are not otherwise mentioned in Haskell. Venus 2 was shown at Epstein’s first Leicester Galleries exhibition in 1917 (FebruaryMarch). Silber dates this version to ‘1914-16?’ (p. 135). Hulme owned ‘Female Figure in Flenite’ (SE 45, plate 11), but here the pudenda are triangular and curved. 23 Translation is from the note to p. 171 on p. 287. Lewis quotes the original French in his text. 24 Maeztu wrote as late as 1934 of ‘mi amigo’ Hulme, valuing not only his ideas but his conduct, the civic virtues that overlaid ‘las flaquezas de la carne’, or weaknesses of the flesh. That would not have been Hulme’s view of the structure of his identity (nor is it the view of this discussion). See Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Ramiro de Maeztu en Londres (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1976), pp. 28-9. 25 E. Giménez Caballero, ‘Conversación con un camisa negra’, p. 1. The interviewer jokes about his (not so) original sin of looking at Maeztu’s correspondence. At «http://www.filosofia.org/hem/dep/gac/gt00401b.htm», accessed 7 February 2004. Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899-1988) was a Falangist, ‘the first Spanish fascist’, and a Surrealist poet. 26 E. Vega Latapie, ‘Evocación’, at «http://members.tripod.com/~hispanidad/maezt1.htm», accessed 7 February 2004. 18

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Chapter 5

T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’ Helen Carr

In his 1912 essay, ‘A Tory Philosophy’, Hulme quotes Nietzsche’s dictum ‘Philosophy is autobiography’, a belief, he points out, also held by Renan, who claimed that ‘Philosophies and theories of politics are nothing in the last resort, when they are analyzed out, but the affirmation of a temperament’ (CW, p. 233).1 In this context Hulme is explaining the difference between ‘the romantic’ and ‘the classic’, but it is an argument he put forward many times. He would slightly modify that view by 1915, but that he himself felt so keenly at this stage that politics or philosophy could be shaped by psychic needs is an issue worth exploring; Hulme’s philosophical enquiries always have an urgency and passion, a driving need to articulate some way of understanding the world, a compulsion to explain and defend his latest point of view. As his friend Jacob Epstein put it, ‘His passion for the truth was uncontrolled’ (1960, p. 7). The changing ideas that he put forward during the eight years charted by his surviving writing embody a highly personal quest, although it is also emblematic of his time. Establishing the chronology of his work has freed Hulme from the charges of muddle and confusion that some of his critics brought against him in the past, understandably enough, perhaps; in Herbert Read’s Speculations Hulme’s pieces had appeared in almost entirely the opposite order from that in which he wrote them, so making coherent sense of them was certainly challenging. Now thanks first to Michael Levenson, and more recently to Karen Csengeri, we can see the stages in Hulme’s development a good deal more clearly. If to Levenson those stages largely appeared as a series of sudden shifts and reversals, Csengeri argues, rightly I think, as Patrick McGuinness has also done, that there are certain continuities.2 I want to look here at some of the ongoing concerns that link the early and the later Hulme; although he may come up with different answers, he is very much driven by the same questions, and even the answers are perhaps not as different as they may at first seem. For Michael Levenson, Hulme embodied in himself the change from early to high modernism, a change that Levenson characterizes as a sharp reversal of values:

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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism A fundamentally individualist perspective has become aggressively anti-individualist. The cult of inner experience has passed to outer control; personal expression has given way to critical discipline. In the place of freedom and spontaneity, art is now characterised in terms of order, restraint and authority. A revolutionary justification is exchanged for a traditionalist. Self-expression yields to self-suppression. The primacy of emotion yields to the primacy of reason. (1984, p. 211)

Levenson’s subtly argued book, The Genealogy of Modernism, in which he presents this argument, untangled many seeming and, indeed, actual contradictions in the emergence of Anglo-American modernism. In his narrative, revolutionary, individualistic early modernism gives way to the consolidation of high modernism in the work of T. S. Eliot, with whom he ends his account, presenting him as the leading advocate of this impersonal, conservative aesthetic. Not all forms of modernism, even among Anglo-Americans, fit this model, as more recent work, particularly on women modernists, has shown, but that is not my point here. What is certainly the case is that there was a widespread trajectory during the period, not just in modernism, but also in much broader social terms, which moves from the questioning or breakdown of traditional assumptions and structures to the formulation and creation of new forms of order and control, and this same movement can be seen in Hulme, though perhaps not quite in the form suggested by Levenson. Perhaps the most extreme forms of that trajectory are the move from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, or from the Russian revolution to the Stalinist era, not that I wish in any crude way to suggest Hulme was moving towards some sort of fascism or totalitarianism; as his most recent biographer, Robert Ferguson, has shown, in some ways Hulme becomes more sympathetic towards democracy, at least his own version of it, during the last three years of his life. Yet what Hulme does is to shift from a position of deep scepticism, analogous, in some ways at least, to poststructuralism, to one that he describes as a belief in absolute religious and ethical values, even if they appear scarcely orthodox ones. Hulme has been described as the ‘great vulgariser of modernism’ (Armstrong, 208), not a judgment with which I would agree, but it could be said that he is a hyper-modernist; he shows the qualities and phases of modernism – at any rate of Anglo-American male modernism – to an extreme degree; its misogyny, its aggression, its iconoclasm, its intellectuality, its fragmentation, its desire for wholeness, and not least, its critique of western modernity. I do not want to argue that one can simply put down Hulme’s ideas to his ‘temperament’, as Renan has it. As Hulme himself recognized, separating out what is ‘temperament’ from what springs from the circumstances of upbringing and culture is a difficult matter; but I do want to show him as someone who registered passionately and to an acute degree the intellectual quandaries of his period. I do not, of course, have room here to give a full account of how I would interpret the evolution (not a word that he would have liked) of Hulme’s thought; there is the ‘Cinders’ period; the Bergson/poetry period; the classicist period; the Worringer period; and finally what I think is best described simply as the war period; through them all go the competing claims of radical uncertainty and of

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absolute belief, the consciousness of the incomprehensibility of the universe, and of the paltriness of human life. The questions in his earliest work that were aroused in him by the vastness of the Canadian prairies find some kind of resolution in the desolate flats of the war zone that he described in his last. In this essay I want to look at Hulme’s preoccupation with the ‘spiritual dread of space’ (Worringer, 1953, p. 15), as the English translation of Worringer’s work puts it, and also his hyper-masculinity. These two aspects do not immediately appear related, indeed they might even seem contradictory; dread is not generally accounted a macho state of mind. It is, however, the apparent contradiction that is, as so often with Hulme, so revealing. I want too to consider the importance of his support from 1913 for non-western art, an admirable openness to other cultures inextricably bound up with some of his most reactionary views. One of the central characteristics of much modernism was just such a fascination with non-western culture, a new sense, as Michael North has argued, of being part of a global world view with which he had grown up.3 I shall look in this essay at three occasions when the troubling implications of an unknown and un-interpretable environment impinge on his thought, and then end by looking at the link between those experiences and, on the one hand, his aggressive cult of masculinity and, on the other, his response to non-western art.

‘The Flats of Canada’ Hulme’s first surviving account of his intellectual and psychological odyssey is the collection of fragmented notes that he entitled ‘Cinders’, probably written shortly after, even perhaps started during, his visit to Canada in 1906, when he worked his way across the prairies, and was profoundly moved by their immense spaces. Two years after being sent down from Cambridge for the first time, he had abandoned the biology and physics degree that he was reluctantly studying at University College, and headed off across the Atlantic, reportedly as a ship’s steward (Ferguson, p. 34). It was a journey to find himself and his future direction, as much as anything else: ‘The road leading over the prairie, at dusk, with the half-breed’, he wrote in ‘Cinders’; ‘Travel helps one to discover the undiscovered portions of one’s own mind’ (CW, p. 22). The Canadian prairies both confirmed and symbolized the sense of the futility of human knowledge that he expresses in ‘Cinders’; ‘The flats of Canada are incomprehensible on any single theory’, he writes there. ‘The world only comprehensible on the cinder theory . . . . The aim of all science and of all thought is to reduce the complex and disconnected world of grit and cinders to a few ideal counters, which we can move about and so form an ungritlike picture of reality – one flattering to our sense of power’ (CW, pp. 10-11). His journey across the limitless prairies becomes a chronotope of his inner loss of certainty. The most significant influence on his thought at this stage appears to be Nietzsche; Herbert Read indeed suggested that the form of ‘Cinders’ might be modelled on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Hulme saw Nietzsche, unusually for the early twentieth century, as a philosopher rather than as the prophet that he was then

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more generally taken to be, whether the Blakean figure that he was for poets like Yeats, or the fearless denouncer of slave morality who appealed so strongly, if in some ways so paradoxically, to socialists and New Women. Hulme, for his part, read Nietzsche much as he is read today, when he has come to be seen as the father of modern deconstruction.4 Yet whilst Hulme found Nietzsche’s radical critique of traditional western assumptions compelling, he also found it deeply troubling. Alun Jones suggests that Hulme’s time on the prairie was an essentially religious experience (1960, p. 23); ‘Cinders’ can be read as an account of a dark night of the soul, the profound and terrifying consciousness of the inadequacy of human understanding in an ungraspable and inexplicable universe. For Hulme, the importance of this experience went beyond the merely cerebral: ‘Necessity of distinguishing between a vague philosophic statement that “reality always escapes a system”, and the definite cinder, felt in a religious way and being a criterion of nearly all judgment, philosophic and aesthetic’ (CW, p. 21). ‘Cinders’ is not religious in any conventional way, but then Hulme’s use of the word ‘religion’ never is; as it would always be for him, religion is more to do with the recognition of human limitation than with any belief in transcendence. Hulme writes in ‘Cinders’ that ‘The sense of reality is inevitably connected with that of space (the world existing before us)’ (CW, p. 19); faced with the incomprehensibility of the space of the prairies, reality has become ‘an ash-heap’, ‘all . . . mud, endless’, ‘a chaos, a cinder-heap’, ‘deserts of dirt’ (CW, pp. 9, 10, and 11). One could read ‘Cinders’ as The Waste Land has been read, as the work of some one agonizingly convinced that the death of God has drained meaning from modern existence. Reviewing Hulme’s own translation of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence in 1917, T. S. Eliot wrote that ‘the scepticism of the present, the scepticism of Sorel, is a torturing vacuity which has developed the craving for belief’.5 Perhaps that was true of both Eliot and Hulme. Hulme’s quest from then on was to find some kind of certitude that he could hold to in defiance of the shifting sands of nihilism. Like the existentialists, Hulme is faced with an absurd universe, and with the angst that that brings, but he is determined to escape it. He may have recognized Nietzsche’s radical skepticism, as the postmodernists have done; but whilst for Derrida, for example, exposing the errors of western ‘white mythology’, critiquing the Enlightenment in the great Enlightenment tradition of demolishing superstition, is something like an act of liberation, Hulme is left with a desperate search for some kind of belief. Like so many of his contemporaries, when faced with the breakdown of his world’s traditional certainties, Hulme wanted to find a new certainty of his own. There are few moments of certainty in ‘Cinders’, except that of the ‘cindery reality’ (CW, p. 9), though there is a suggestion that there might be bodily rather than intellectual knowledge – ‘the tip of the finger’ (CW, p. 18) in contact with the world – and there is also a mention of poetry, to which Hulme would next turn, also here connected with the body; ‘All poetry is an affair of the body – that is, to be real it must affect body’ (CW, p. 21). With its aphorisms and analogies, ‘Cinders’ itself reads more like a modernist prose poem than anything else, discontinuous, threading together images rather than argument, full of sudden and

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striking juxtapositions. Its style was perhaps a response to the turmoil and desolation in Hulme’s inner world, the loss of belief in coherent systems that the long vacant stretches of the Canadian prairies reinforced. ‘The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse’, Hulme wrote a couple of years later, ‘was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada’ (CW, p. 53). This turn to poetry might seem surprising, because for Hulme, language is itself one of the conventional systems that we mistakenly feel give meaning to the world. We only communicate, Hulme suggests, because we have evolved what Wittgenstein would later call language games, but the danger is that we take the conventions of the game, ‘the gossamer world of symbolic communication’, for truth itself: The ultimate reality is a circle of persons, i.e. animals who communicate. There is a kind of gossamer web, woven between the real things, and by means of this animals communicate. For purposes of communication they invent a symbolic language. Afterwards this language, used to excess, becomes a disease, and we get the curious phenomena of men explaining themselves by means of the gossamer web that connects them. Language becomes a disease in the hands of the counter-word mongers. It must be constantly remembered that it is an invention for the convenience of men . . . . Symbols are picked out and believed to be realities. (CW, p. 8)

What is the cure for diseased language? Is it possible to find a way of using language that does not simply involve ‘counter-words’? For Hulme, the instinctive answer was poetry, though being perhaps more a thinker than a poet he wanted a theory to explain this, and over the next two years he was to think out his justification. That poetry can make a physical, bodily impact was his starting point, but he would need Bergson as well as French vers libre to develop his ideas, and he may not have read either at this stage. There is a reference to the ‘flux’ in ‘Cinders’ but no suggestion of the possibility of the Bergsonian intuition that would later be so important to Hulme: ‘All is in flux. The moralists, the capital letterists, attempt to find a framework outside the flux, a solid bank for the river, a pier rather than a raft. Truth is what helps a particular sect in the general flow’ (CW, p.10). Hulme’s starting point as a poet was his need to contain the overwhelming experience he had had on the prairies, where he experienced so strongly this ‘disconnected world of grit and cinders’ (CW, p. 11); as he wrote later: ‘I came to the subject of verse from the inside rather than the outside. There were certain impressions I wanted to fix’ (CW, p. 50). The Bergsonian theory of poetry that he evolved would be his first significant stab (perhaps an appropriately violent image for someone with a penchant for discussing poetry in military metaphors) at fixing things, finding a certainty to put in the place of those he had lost.6 Hulme returned to England, where he told a former school friend that he had taken up the study of philosophy, and then went to Brussels for seven months, supporting himself by teaching English, whilst improving his knowledge of French and German, and, it appears, reading widely on language, poetry and perception. It

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was probably whilst he was there that he worked out his programme for modern poetry, on which he would address the Poets’ Club in the autumn of 1908. He still held to the view that poetry to be ‘real’ had to ‘affect body’ (CW, p. 21); in another collection of fragmentary jottings from this period, published later as ‘Notes on Language and Style’, he argues that ‘All emotion depends on real solid vision or sound; it is physical’, and that, unlike the ‘counter’ language of prose, in poetry ‘[e]ach word must be an image seen, not a counter’ (CW, pp. 24-5). He was much influenced at this stage by the poet and critic Remy de Gourmont’s argument (itself a development of Nietzsche’s ideas) that poetry introduced fresh and vital metaphors into the language, metaphors which would eventually pass as dead metaphors, or in Hulme’s term, ‘counters’, into prose. Hulme was now convinced, as he phrased it, in typically aggressive terms, that poetry ‘is the advance guard of language’ whereas prose ‘is the museum where the old weapons of poetry are kept’ (CW, p. 27). ‘The Prose writer drags meaning along with the rope. The Poet makes it stand on end and hit you’ (CW, p. 31). The poem as boxer? There is a fascination with the figure of the boxer in this period, exemplified in the proto-Dadaist Arthur Craven, but why is it is so important for Hulme that poetry is described in these pugilistic terms? I shall return to this question in my conclusion. For now I want to look at how Bergson helped Hulme to explain poetry’s knock-out blow. Bergson’s theory of language, like Nietzsche’s, was an attack on the artificiality of conventional systems, but his philosophy gave Hulme hope in a way that Nietzsche had not. When he first read Bergson, Hulme later said, he felt ‘an almost physical sense of exhilaration, a sudden expansion, a kind of mental explosion’ (CW, p. 126). Language, Bergson says, breaks up in crude segments the flux of experience, the stream of time: it is a pragmatic tool that makes human action possible, yet the intellectual knowledge it yields is always a distortion and simplification. Language and the intellect prevent one from making contact with the ceaseless flux of being, which we can only know through intuition. The arbitrary divisions of language alienate us from the fluidity of experience, so that (in Hulme’s words) ‘one must dive back into the flux . . . if one wishes to know reality’ (CW, p. 87). Bergson’s concept of intuition offered Hulme the possibility of direct knowledge of reality, something beyond the counters on the one hand and the cinders on the other. As he would later write: ‘I must find salvation in fixity of some kind. I finally found what I wanted in Bergson’ (CW, p. 155). He had reached what he describes as the actual frontier position of modern speculation. The intellectualists, the lay theologians, having been violently expelled from the temple and the final admission made that logical thought is by its nature incapable of containing the flux of reality, what remains? Are we to resign ourselves to ignorance of the nature of the cosmos, or is there some new method open to us? Bergson says that there is – that of intuition. (CW, p. 91)

As Hulme goes on to say: ‘By intellect one can construct approximate models, by intuition one can identify oneself with the flux’ (CW, p. 91). For Hulme what is

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particularly valuable for his poetic theory is Bergson’s belief that art, which works through intuition and the imagination, can lead one back into contact with the complex, shifting mutability of experience. In his first book, Time and Free Will, published in 1889, Bergson had written: ‘Now if some bold novelist, tearing aside the cleverly woven curtain of our conventional ego, shows us under this appearance of logic a fundamental absurdity, under this juxtaposition of simple states an infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they are named, we commend him for having known us better than we knew ourselves’ (Bergson, 1910, p. 133). Whilst to some extent this is an illusion – Bergson says, because the novelist can only use words, we are only seeing the ‘shadow’ of ourselves – all the same we gain new insight into the complexity and contradictory nature of the self: ‘Encouraged by him’, Bergson concludes, ‘we have put aside for an instant the veil which we interposed between our consciousness and ourselves. He has brought us back into our own presence’ (1910, p. 134). This partial overcoming of the nature of language, he suggests, can also be achieved – and this was particularly relevant for Hulme’s poetic theories – through the use of images, something Bergson discusses in Introduction to Metaphysics, a text that Hulme would translate. Having compared ‘duration’, the flux of the inner life as it unfolds in time, with the unrolling of a spool, the winding of thread into a ball, and the drawing out of a tiny piece of elastic, Bergson argues that although ‘no image can produce exactly the original feeling I have of the flow of my own conscious life’, it is still the case that the image has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete. No image can replace the intuition of duration, but many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up. (Bergson, 1999, pp. 27-8)

For Hulme, of course, the image becomes central. As he puts it in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, probably delivered in November 1908, ‘there are, roughly speaking, two methods of communication, a direct, and a conventional language. The direct language is poetry, it is direct because it deals in images. The indirect language is prose, because it uses images that have died and become figures of speech’ (CW, p. 55). Yet like Bergson, he emphasizes that poetry works through the bringing together of possibly very different images ‘in juxtaposition’, the collage principle that underlines so much modernist art; ‘To this piling-up of images in different lines, one can find a fanciful analogy in music . . . . Two visual images form what one may call a visual chord. They unite to suggest an image which is different to both’ (CW, p. 54). Given that for Hulme poetry is the contrary of conventional language, it is scarcely surprising that he rejects the accepted regular metric lines and traditional forms of poetry, turning to Gustave Kahn’s exposition of the principles of vers libre in order to effect ‘the

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emancipation of verse’ for English poetry that the French have achieved for theirs (CW, p. 52). Poetry, he says, must find ‘a new technique each generation. Each age must have its own special form of expression’ (CW, p. 51). ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ is the opening salvo – to add another military metaphor – in the development of modernist verse, and Hulme leaves one in no doubt that he intends it to be verse fit for fighting men.7 He is insistent on transforming poetry from what he regards as the effeminate decadence of post-Victorian poetry into a manly art: ‘The latter stages in the decay of an art form are very interesting and worth study because they are peculiarly applicable to the state of poetry at the present day. They resemble the latter stages in the decay of religion when the spirit has gone and there is a meaningless reverence for formalities and ritual. The carcass is dead and all the flies are upon it. Imitative poetry springs up like weeds, and women whimper and whine of you and I, alas, and roses, roses all the way. It becomes the expression of sentimentality rather than of virile thought’ (CW, p. 51). I will return to this association of the whimpering women and the decomposing, fly-ridden carcass later; but I want to end this section with a brief comment on the poetry that Hulme wrote. Hulme insists that he turned to poetry to capture ‘the peculiar feeling’ induced by the prairies, but little of his verse appears at first sight to do that in any straightforward way. Yet it is striking that most of his poems are about, or evoke, the sky, most often at night, recalling, I would suggest, the ‘wide horizons’ of the prairie skies. Of the eight poems published by Csengeri, for example, seven in some way or other are concerned with the sky. Those poems, however, rarely reflect that overwhelming sense of the incomprehensibility of the cosmos that the flats of Canada (according to ‘Cinders’) induced in him, although there are occasional dark moments in the poems that he chose not to publish. Alun Jones quotes a one-line image: ‘Down the long desolate street of the stars’, and also reprints a bleak poem that begins, ‘At Night!/ All the terror’s in that’, and that ends with a reference to ‘the obscene gods/ On their flying cattle/ Roaming the sky prairie’ (Jones, 1960, p. 24). Hulme’s poems more often, however, seem intent, not so much on ‘fixing’ an experience of such spiritual bleakness, as of countering it. Hulme’s best known poems use images, which although they refer to the sky, domesticate it, tame it, escape its awesomeness: in ‘Autumn’ the ‘ruddy moon lean[s] over a hedge / Like a red-faced farmer’, and the ‘wistful stars’ have ‘white faces like town children’; in ‘Above the Dock’ the moon hangs ‘Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height’, yet ‘What seemed so far away/ is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play’; in ‘The Embankment’ the ‘fallen gentleman’ wants God to ‘make small/ The old star-eaten blanket of the sky/ That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie’ (CW, p. 3).8 In the fragments collected as ‘Notes on Language and Style’, Hulme makes a comment that may illuminate this transformation. Formerly, he says, he thought that when the poet ‘experienced emotions which strangely moved him’, he (or presumably, she, but Hulme doesn’t mention that) would try ‘to find new images to express what he felt’. In practice, however, he has found that not to be true, as ‘the very act of trying to find a form to fit the separate phrases into, itself leads to the creation of new images hitherto not felt by the poet. In a sense the poem writes itself’ (CW, p. 40). In literary terms, that is an important

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statement about the fruitfulness as opposed to the limitations of language; the poem is not the experience but the transformation and transmutation of it through the act of writing. What is happening, one could suggest, is that the poet’s unconscious is reworking the experience through language, as an analysand would rework a trauma in the psychoanalytic dyad, so it can be left behind as something no longer threatening or undermining. Yet in spite of his poems’ recasting of the skies, the experience of the prairies would remain with Hulme, and come back to him again.

Worringer and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’ In 1911, returning home from the International Philosophical Congress in Bologna, Hulme stopped in Paris to meet Pierre Lasserre, one of the leaders of the rightwing French movement, Action Française, later also to influence T. S. Eliot. Hulme had read two of Lasserre’s books, and much admired his reactionary political stance and his fierce attack on the romantics, but he was troubled by the fact that Lasserre was deeply opposed to Bergson. It was a significant meeting for Hulme; it confirmed him in the conservative political views that he had already begun to advocate earlier that year in the Commentator; it encouraged him to take up the cause of the classical against the romantic, an important staging post in the development of his thought; and it would eventually cause him to question whether or not Bergson could really give him the answers that he needed. At the time, however, Hulme resisted Lasserre’s critique of Bergson. As Sanford Schwartz has pointed out, there was a Bergsonianism of the right as well as of the left. Lasserre was attacking that of the left, which held that Bergson’s thought, with its emphasis on constant change and fluidity, supported a progressive radical agenda. Hulme, Schwartz argues, had always espoused a Bergsonianism of the right, and he points out a telling comparison that Hulme makes at one point between Bergson’s philosophy and Edmund Burke’s social and political views. For those on the right, Schwartz suggests, Bergson offered an alternative to the positivistic and deterministic materialism that had been widespread among intellectuals in the nineteenth century, and he offered ‘new grounds for affirming the moral freedom of the individual’ (1992, p. 278). As Hulme puts it himself, Bergson freed him from the belief that the world is a ‘vast machine’, and from what ‘Huxley called . . . the nightmare of determinism’ (CW, p. 170). Hulme never completely gave up on the insights he had found in Bergson – or so I would argue – but he would come gradually to feel that Bergson could no longer sufficiently meet his urgent need for a defense against the unknowable, or give him the fixity he craved. For now, however, he continued to defend him, even though the immense popularity of the lectures that Bergson gave in London later that year shook him once more; could Bergson really be worth supporting if he was someone that so many others – and worst of all, Hulme points out, nine out of ten of them women – admired so greatly? Yet all the same, he wrote the following November (1911) that whilst he much applauded Pierre Lasserre’s anti-

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romanticism, he did not wholly accept his critique of Bergson’s thought as ‘the last disguise of romanticism’ (CW, p. 165). If he did, he admits, he would have to change his views, but for now he believed that the essentials of Bergson’s philosophy remained true; he would, he promised, try in a later article to explain how he made a compromise between the two, something he never explicitly does, unless ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, with its re-affirmation of Bergsonian intuition and its impassioned rejection of romanticism, is that compromise. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is, as Levenson has argued, a transitional piece; Hulme does not criticize Bergson, even though he explicitly evokes with approval the Action Française group; he continues to discuss poetry rather than the visual arts to which he would turn the next year; and perhaps most importantly, although he condemns romanticism he does not, as he soon would, reject the whole western humanistic tradition from the time of the Renaissance. Bergson is not explicitly mentioned, but Hulme still puts forward a Bergsonian view of how poetry works. Poetry, he says, is not a counter language but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process. It chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters . . . . Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language. (CW, p. 70)

The image as the ‘very essence of an intuitive language’: this is the core of his Bergsonian poetic credo, but it has to be noted that Hulme has taken this passage verbatim from an article he wrote in 1909 (CW, p. 95). Could the repetition rather than the development of his argument suggest that his conviction was waning? An aporia opens up in the essay as Hulme insists on ‘accurate, precise and definite description’ in poetry whilst putting forward a theory of language that makes such accuracy unattainable (CW, p. 68). It is not entirely certain when Hulme wrote ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, but it must have been about the time that his Complete Poetical Works, his public farewell to poetry, was published in the New Age.9 So although he prophesies that a ‘period of dry, hard, classical verse’ (CW, p. 69) is on the way, he himself has given up the ‘terrific struggle with language’ that poetry always entails’ (CW, p. 68). The gender associations that he evoked in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, however, remain in place; this virile ‘dry, hard’ poetry is contrasted with romantic verse, full of ‘sloppiness’, always ‘whining or moaning about something or other’, on the one hand, ‘damp’, on the other, like a ‘drug’ (CW, p. 66). Hulme denounces Rousseau’s romantic belief in the goodness of man, and affirms, as part of his classical view, his belief in the doctrine of Original Sin; the human limitations of which he had been so aware in ‘Cinders’ in intellectual terms are extended to the moral terrain; ‘Man’, he writes, ‘is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal . . . . It is only by tradition and organisation that anything can be got out of him’ (CW, p. 61). This is, however, a shift in emphasis rather

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than a new way of seeing the world; that would wait for his next period of travel, his visit to Germany the following year. Hulme had not chosen to leave England for Germany, and in fact delayed his departure as long as he could. He had returned to Cambridge in 1912, this time with an enthusiastic recommendation from Bergson himself, but he was sent down once more, and was forced to leave the country to escape the wrath of an outraged father (a philosopher named Herbert Wildon Carr) whose 16-year-old daughter he had attempted to seduce. Once more he was at a turning point in his life; his future plans in disarray, his faith in poetry apparently lost, and in the wake of his encounter with Lasserre, his beliefs about the world once more unsettled. In Germany, he came across the work of Wilhelm Worringer, whose 1908 book, Abstraction and Empathy: a Contribution to the Psychology of Style, the publication of his doctoral thesis, had had an extraordinary impact in German intellectual and artistic circles. Worringer had argued – and this thesis would appear in paraphrase in Hulme’s lecture, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, which he gave in January 1914 – that there were two fundamentally different forms of art; abstract and empathetic (Hulme would present them as the ‘geometric’ and the ‘vital’), the former the non-realist art of non-western civilizations like the Indian, Egyptian and Assyrian, as well as of ‘primitive’ people, such as the Africans and the people of the South Seas, the latter the mimetic art of the western tradition, founded in Greece and revived in the Renaissance and since. Worringer discounts the usual western assumption that non-western art fails to be mimetic simply because those people lack the necessary skills; it is nothing to do with ability, but with a different worldview. Empathetic or mimetic art is practiced by those who feel at home in the world, confident of their place in it; it is the art form of the humanist tradition. Abstract art is practiced by those who find the world a baffling, inexplicable, fearful place; they turn to abstract, geometric, and patterned forms to create order and stability in a universe in which they find none. This ‘spiritual dread of space in relation to the extended, disconnected, bewildering world of phenomena’ is according to Worringer an ‘instinctive fear conditioned by man’s feeling of being lost in the universe’, something suppressed by the rationalistic west. ‘The civilised peoples of the East’, on the other hand, had a ‘more profound world-instinct’, and ‘remained conscious of the unfathomable entanglements of all the phenomena of life, and all the intellectual mastery of the world-picture could not deceive them as to this. Their spiritual dread of space, their instinct for the relativity of all that is, did not stand, as with primitive peoples, before cognition, but above cognition’ (Worringer, 1953, p. 16). Worringer’s book comes out of his great admiration for non-western art. He had worked in the Paris Trocadéro museum, where Picasso at around that very time had discovered African art, but Worringer was still unaware in 1908 of the impact that non-western art was just beginning to have on European artists. Worringer compares this ‘spiritual dread of space’ with agoraphobia, a condition at the time thought to be a particular product of modern, urban life, and goes on to say ‘man is now just as lost and helpless vis-à-vis the world-picture as primitive man’ (1953, p. 18). In 1908, however, he still thought that abstract art was impossible in modern individualistic

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society; abstract art may be what would best express the experience of modernity, but he does not, at that stage, envisage its return. By 1910, when the third edition of his book appeared, he included a preface in which he explains that he has realized his mistake. His book, he had discovered, had spoken directly to the artists of his day, who were already moving away from mimetic art. The great sociologist of modern alienation Georg Simmel was, he points out, one of the book’s most enthusiastic admirers. Hulme, who met Worringer while in Germany, would have known that his work was now seen as offering a philosophical basis for the experiments of modern art. Worringer gave Hulme a new direction; he returned to England as a passionate defender of non-western and modern abstract art, and a scourge of humanist attitudes. He still does not explicitly abandon his belief in Bergson, though ‘flux’ takes a different coloring: this art, he says, strove to create ‘a certain abstract geometrical shape, which being durable and permanent, shall be a refuge from the flux and impermanence of outside nature’ (CW, pp. 273-4). Like himself, in fact, these artists needed to ‘find salvation in fixity of some kind’, and they did it through their art. He had now available a different answer to the reason for his own ‘spiritual dread of space in relation to the extended, disconnected, bewildering world of phenomena’. According to Worringer, it sprang from the ‘more profound world-instinct’ that western rationalism has suppressed; he was justified in his own bleak view of the world and of the limitations of humankind that had led him to oppose the romantic ideals of progress and human goodness, themselves the product of humanism, which, as, he later put it, ‘contains the germs of the disease that was bound to come to its full evil development in Romanticism’ (CW, p. 250). Humanism espoused a doctrine that was the opposite of that of Original Sin: ‘the belief that man as a part of nature was after all something satisfactory’. Although Copernicus discovered that ‘man was not the centre of the world’, that is precisely what humanism took him to be. ‘You get a change from a certain profundity and intensity to that flat and insipid optimism, which, passing through its first stage of decay in Rousseau, has finally culminated in the state of slush in which we have the misfortune to live.’ He goes on to say that for ‘proof of the radical difference’ between these two different worldviews, ‘you have only to look at books which are written now on Indian religion and philosophy. There is a sheer anaemic inability to understand the stark uncompromising bleakness of this religious attitude’ (CW, pp. 270-1). One might argue that Hulme’s appropriation of the entire non-western world in support of his own view of things might leave him equally unable to understand it; the same of course could be said of Worringer, but what they have both become aware of is that it is essential, as Worringer says, to ‘pass beyond a narrowly European outlook’, and to realize that European civilization is not necessarily superior to others, merely different (1953, p. 135). Hulme follows Worringer in arguing that what the west has taken to be the ‘necessary principles of aesthetics are merely a psychology of Classical and modern European art’ (CW, p. 250). Hulme was aware that the two sculptors whom he most admired, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, had been deeply influenced by non-western art in the move away

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from representational work, as had Wyndham Lewis. Whilst in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ he had suggested rather tentatively that change might be on the way, he now claims there has already been ‘a change in sensibility that has enabled us to appreciate Egyptian, Indian, Byzantine, Polynesian and Negro work as art and not as archaeology or ethnology’ (CW, p. 250). This ‘re-emergence of geometric art at the present day may be the precursor of the re-emerging of the corresponding attitude towards the world, and so of the final break-up of the Renaissance’ (CW, p. 286). In Speculations, Read prefaced ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ with a sentence from one of Hulme’s notebooks: ‘The fright of the mind before the unknown created not only the first gods, but also the first art’ (Read, 1960, 73).10 The aphorism sums up his argument well, yet given Hulme’s insistence that the kind of art he supports is a virile alternative to romantic ‘slush’, the implications of advocating an abstract art ultimately associated with ‘the fright of the mind’ might have been expected to trouble him. On the contrary, however, he implies that this new anti-humanist art can be so commendably pessimistic, inhuman and intense, just because it comes out of a realistically dark view of the universe, in contrast to the ‘flat and insipid optimism of the belief in progress’ (CW, p. 277). Abstract art, he insists is ‘hard and durable’, ‘austere, mechanical, clear-cut and bare’, quite unlike the ‘soft’ art of the humanistic tradition (CW, pp. 284, 278, and 271), the ‘sloppy dregs of the Renaissance’, admired by ‘“spinsterly”, sloppy and romantic people’ (CW, pp. 258 and 261). The Bloomsbury painters, who, he asserts, simply offer a ‘cultured and anaemic imitation’ of the new geometrical art, are given particularly short shrift. Their pictures in general are ‘pallid’; Roger Fry’s ‘colour is always rather sentimental and pretty’, and he achieves ‘the extraordinary feat of adapting the austere Cézanne into something quite fitted for chocolate boxes’ (CW, pp. 263-4). Hulme was giving his support elsewhere. Lewis and Pound also spoke on the occasion when Hulme gave his ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’ lecture, and Pound wrote the evening up for The Egoist. Even though Hulme and Lewis had personally fallen out by them, the theory that he developed here would be an important contribution to the development of Vorticism, named by Pound and launched later that the year in Lewis’s aptly named Blast.

‘A Very Long Horizon’ When war was declared, Hulme enlisted immediately, telling Richard Aldington, who attempted to do the same but was turned down, that ‘war is not for sensitive men’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 183). In fact, the letters that Hulme wrote home from the war do not suggest he was insensitive to carnage himself, but there does surprisingly enter his writing a certain calm that had not been there before. Both Csengeri and Hulme’s biographer, Robert Ferguson, compare his descriptions of the front with the world he describes in ‘Cinders’. Ferguson suggests that perhaps the reason why ‘trench warfare neither horrified him nor greatly surprised him . . . was because, in the visionary glimpses recorded some years earlier in the ‘Cinders’

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notebook, he had already seen it all before, “all the mud, endless, except when bound together by the spectator”, a place of “primeval chaos”, where “the eye is in the mud, the eye is the mud” . . . [and] “the lines . . . lead nowhere”’ (pp. 211-12). If the prairies had spoken to him of the limitations of human understanding, and Worringer’s ‘spiritual dread of space’ of the alienation and disorientation of modernity, the front, which makes literal the existential fears of an absurd universe that he had experienced in Canada, is, in some strange way, something of a solace. It is not that he denies that it is ‘a fearful place’; ‘really like a kind of nightmare, in which you are in the middle of an enormous saucer of mud with explosions & shots going off all around the edge, a sort of fringe of palm trees made of fireworks all around it’; as on the prairies, ‘there is nothing certain or fixed’ (CW, pp. 313, 319 and 326). Yet the real physical danger had perhaps appeased the inner dread. There is a great sense of acceptance in his writing about the front. The war is simply a melancholy necessity. It chimed with the view of the world he had always had. When a ‘simple subaltern goes to the front for the first time’, he says, The first actual sign of war he will see will be right along a very long horizon (for the front is for the most part very flat) – a constant succession of rising and falling rockets and ‘star’ shells. He will see this long before he gets to a distance when he can hear occasional bursts of musketry firing. The officer who described this to me said he thought this the most depressing sight he had ever seen, particularly when it was in the drizzling rain. The path of a rocket is itself pure form expressive of melancholy. It rises only to fall hopelessly again, a constant state of ‘coming down like a stick’. When a rocket goes off on a fine night at a fair, the excitement of the light, and the upward rush, to some extent weakens the depressing effect of the actual curve described. But when it is in drizzling rain this is eliminated, and we get to the depressing effect of the curve in all its purity. No greater expression of hopeless futility can be imagined than this long line of vainly labouring rockets. (CW, p. 354)

In this image of the emasculated impotence of the rockets, sinking hopelessly through the drizzling rain, Hulme sums up the bleakness of the front, while muting its terror. Young soldiers are liable, he acknowledges, to succumb to despair. Never having been depressed before, they do not realise that ‘it will pass off’. An older man – Hulme was then thirty-two – can say to himself, ‘Courage, thou hast endured greater trials than this; the worst also passes’ (CW, p. 344). Hulme was invalided back to England in 1915, and after his convalescence trained as an officer, so he did not return to the front until March 1916. While still in England, he published two more series of articles, more or less concurrently in the New Age, his ‘War Notes’, which appeared under the name of ‘North Staffs’ from November 1915 to March 1916, and ‘A Notebook’, signed ‘T.E.H.’, which appeared there from December 1915 to February 1916. The former is concerned with what Hulme sees as Britain’s inept management of the war, with a very topical debate about conscription, which was being introduced at the time, and with the question of pacifism, which Hulme passionately denounces, particularly the liberal, rationalist justifications for it being put forward by Bertrand Russell. The latter is a much more generally philosophical piece, an abridged version of

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which was published by Herbert Read under the appropriate title of ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’, as Hulme reiterates at length the distinctions he had laid down in ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ and his claim for the ‘change in sensibility’ which has made the appreciation of non-western art possible. The ‘War Notes’ and ‘A Notebook’ are, in fact, closely linked, and the general argument in ‘A Notebook’ is to a large extent the justification of his claim in ‘War Notes’, in defence of his stance towards the war, that there is an absolute system of ethical values, which can be recognized by a ‘logique du coeur’. He draws on a remarkably wide range of reading in German and British philosophical and political texts, though largely in order to reject them. Once again, there is a shift from his pre-war thinking, but not, I would suggest, as dramatic a shift as Levenson claims. Bergsonian flux now takes yet another form. Hulme begins the ‘War Notes’ with an argument against the Liberal assumption that ‘things are fixed more or less as they are’, while the truth is that Europe is ‘in a continual flux of which the present war is a highly critical intensification’ (CW, p. 332). He starts ‘A Notebook’ in much the same way, arguing that the Liberal pacifists cannot understand the importance of the war because they ‘hypostatise their school atlases, and fail to realise that others do not regard Europe as fixed like arithmetic’ (CW, p. 419). It is because the future is unknowable and unpredictable, and progress by no means guaranteed, that it is essential to fight this war; Germany does not subscribe to the same values as Britain, and the future could be dark. Bergson’s theories, Hulme still maintains, are true of the organic world of the realms of history, psychology and biology, but he now suggests that reality should be seen as three discontinuous zones, concentric circles of which the organic is the middle one. The outer ring is the inorganic world, of mathematical and physical sciences; the inmost that of religion and ethics. Thinkers like Bergson and Nietzsche have correctly, he maintains, accepted the absolute division between the organic and inorganic sciences, hence their refutation of materialism and determinism, but they have failed to realize that there must be a break between biology and theology. That confusion is the essence of humanism; insisting on the division between the spheres ‘breaks the whole Renascence tradition’ (CW, p. 420). Yet Hulme continues, like Bergson, to emphasize intuitive knowledge. The great presence behind both these series is ‘the tragic vision’ of Pascal, to whom these notes, Hulme says, should be regarded as a prolegomena. Hulme’s ‘logique du coeur’, which he contrasts with Russell’s liberal, rationalist relativism, is surely a reference to Pascal’s belief that ‘the heart has its reasons that the Reason knows not of’.11 Hulme first mentions Pascal in 1911; if he had not read him before he went to Canada, his experience on the prairies must have been recalled by Pascal’s famous words in the Pensées: ‘The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.’12 Pascal’s emphasis on intuitive knowledge had in fact been an important influence on Bergson, but what intuition can reveal has by now changed for Hulme; Bergson’s intuition gave access to one’s own inner life; now Hulme is insisting it reveals objective and absolute truths. Towards the end of ‘War Notes’, Hulme contrasts two opposed systems of ethics, that of the ‘rationalist

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humanitarians’, like Russell, where the ‘fundamental values are Life and Personality’, and the ‘more heroic or tragic system of ethical values’, which holds that values are ‘not relative only to life, but are objective and absolute’ (CW, p. 411). According to the first system, life is the highest value, and therefore pacifism is the only rational position; according to the second, life may have to be sacrificed for a greater good. There is, in fact, something heroic, and indeed tragic, about Hulme’s determination to return to the war, particularly in light of his very limited hopes of what the war will achieve: ‘In this war’, he writes, ‘we are fighting for no great liberation of mankind, for no great jump forward, but merely accomplishing a work, which, if the nature of things was ultimately “good”, would be useless, but which in this actual “vale of tears” becomes from time to time necessary, merely in order that bad may not get worse’ (CW, p. 397). Hulme acknowledges that Russell will probably find his attitude irrational, and his act of faith, which is what it is, can indeed hardly be said to be a return to ‘the primacy of reason’, in Levenson’s phrase. Yet on the other hand, neither is it a return to ‘the primacy of emotion’. Towards the end of ‘A Notebook’, Hulme insists that ‘the religious attitude’ has little to do with sentiment: ‘I hold, quite coldly and intellectually, as it were, that the way of thinking about the world and man, the conception of sin, and the categories that ultimately make up the religious attitude, are the true categories and the right way of thinking’ (CW, p. 455). Hulme has not returned to any ‘traditionalist’ position. This religious attitude could not be further from the usual Christian belief in Providence. His pessimistic ethical absolutism is as radical a rejection of western modernity as his questioning of human understanding on the prairies.

‘Virile Thought’ I want to end with a coda on what I have called Hulme’s hyper-masculinity, one of the most striking ways in which he figures as a hyper-modernist, and make some connections with the particular strand of Hulme’s odyssey that I have traced here, as well as his espousal of non-western forms. The pervasiveness of misogynistic rhetoric in modernism has been the subject of much critical debate, and I have argued elsewhere that to ascribe modernist misogyny, as certain feminist critics have done, to a literal fear of women entering the literary market place is surely misplaced, given the evidence of the help that many male modernists gave to women writers and artists.13 Misogynistic though their language may be, the male modernists’ aim is not primarily, in most instances, so much to do with putting women down, as with promoting the role of the poet or artist. This is not to excuse it, or to suggest it did not in itself cause real problems for women modernists; it is simply to note how it was deployed. Poets and artists, in the wake of the reaction against the aesthetic movement that followed the Wilde trial, had to struggle to escape the imputation of effeminacy. The campaign against the decadents was headed by W. E. Henley’s National Observer, and Ford Madox Ford complained in 1911, three years after Hulme had given his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, that ‘It

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was Henley and his friends who introduced into the English writing mind the idea that a man of action was something fine and a man of letters a sort of castrato.’14 For someone like Pound, for example, the need to create a new virile persona for the artist appeared fundamental in establishing the credibility of his aesthetic. Masculinity signified the place of authority and power, and for the male modernists, establishing their own manliness in contrast to the effeminacy of their rivals appeared a crucial stage in the establishment of their presence in the literary or artistic scene. Hulme is no exception to this, though he was in practice more belittling of women’s abilities than Pound was, and more conventional in his view of the woman’s place, but perhaps even more than Pound he is impelled to assert his masculinity against that of other men. For Hulme, issues of class play a major role; what he rejected was the model of the gentleman, particularly what he sees as the effete, gentlemanly dilettantes of Cambridge, whether those he met there, or the ex-Cambridge Bloomsbury group in London. In ‘War Notes’, for example, he makes an especially virulent attack on that ‘particularly foolish specimen of the aesthete’ Clive Bell, and it should not be forgotten that Russell, whom he also abuses, was then at Cambridge, an aristocrat and closely associated with Bloomsbury (CW, p. 374). When Hulme, whose grandfather had made the family fortune as a pawnbroker, first went up to Cambridge in 1904, at a time when associations with trade were still an embarrassment to those wanting social acceptance, and when learning the gentlemanly codes was regarded as essential to advancement, he refused to give up his Midlands accent, which in fact he never lost, and by sheer force of personality quickly emerged as a leader, organizing his admiring followers into the appropriately named ‘Discord Club’. One of the things he absolutely refused to adopt was the gentleman’s chivalrous attitude to women. Among the many threads that led to his expulsion was his habit of shocking the female members of the Cambridge theatre audience by the unseemliness of his loud comments. Hulme cultivated a reputation as a womaniser, but he was loath, it seems, to admit to any accompanying affection. Kate Lechmere tried in vain to get him to say he loved her as well as enjoying making love to her. Sexual prowess was something a man should boast of; sexual attachments were a sign of effeminate weakness. David Trotter has coined the term ‘anti-pathos’ to describe Wyndham Lewis in this regard, and it is equally applicable to Hulme. Hulme all his life retained the bluff uncompromising pugnaciousness of a North Country or Midlands farmer or unpolished manufacturer. He prided himself on his country directness – when lecturing to a select London audience he told them, ‘I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way’ (CW, p. 49). David Leverenz, in his influential book Manhood in the American Renaissance, argues that by the mid-nineteenth century in the United States, the dominant model of masculinity was no longer either the patrician or the yeoman, but that of the entrepreneur. Patterns of masculinity were different in Britain from those in the States, but one could see Hulme in an alternative tradition of masculinity to that of the well-bred upper class English gentlemen, a tradition which might include

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Carlyle’s Captains of Industry, Heathcliff, Thornton, and several of the manufacturers who appear in Shaw’s plays. Be that as it may, Hulme’s rejection of romanticism, of liberal, hedonistic democracy, of humanistic values is his rejection of a class ideology. Hulme was not alone in thinking British gentry decadent, though he is striking in the virulence with which he associates this decadence with the entire western tradition. Hulme had learnt the importance of attempting to escape a Eurocentric mind-set from Worringer, but it was his own sense of being a hostile outsider to the privileged world of the cultured appreciation of a high art tradition that made him so ready to seek an alternative viewpoint. As I have noted in this essay, Hulme consistently defended the poetry or art he admired through emphasizing its masculine virtues. He uses military or combative language to explain the impact of poetry, and ‘hard’ and ‘dry’ remain his favorite words of praise; people and art forms that he slights are ‘soft’, ‘sloppy’, ‘insipid’, ‘anaemic’, ‘damp’ and ‘whining’. Like Sartre, he is appalled by viscosity, most famously expressed when he compares romanticism, whose concepts ‘mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience’, to ‘pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table’ (CW, p. 62). ‘Mess’ and ‘blur’ are always bad for Hulme, as for other male modernists. Hulme is an extreme example of those with a horror of the abject, of anything that threatens the borders of the ego, that evades control.15 He abhors bodily outpourings, like those of the whimpering women who are associated with the decaying fly-infested corpse; in a striking simile in his ‘Preface’ to Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, he writes, ‘Our younger novelists, like those Roman fountains in which water pours from the mouth of a human mask, gush as though spontaneously from the depths of their being, a muddy romanticism that has in reality a very long pipe’ (CW, p. 249). Romanticism, figured as womanly, damp and sloppy, spilt religion, revolts him. Perhaps his particular horror of the limitless prairies and his sympathy with Worringer’s spiritual dread of space can be linked to this need for borders, for the definite, for the ‘clear outlines of things’, for, as he puts it, ‘fixity’. I do not want to reduce Hulme’s quest for an answer to the problem of human knowledge, such an acute intellectual crisis then, and perhaps still, to an attempt to deal with his own psychological complexities, but I would argue that they colored this quest in a way characteristic of that time. For most of his life Hulme would have agreed that they did, even if his analysis of himself might have been different. In his war writings, though he still holds that the arguments of most of his opponents bear out the thesis that ‘philosophy is autobiography’, in the face of Russell’s argument that those who support the war do so out of deep aggressive impulses, he refuses to admit that this psychologism, in this instance, applies to himself, and moves to his thesis of absolute values, his final mode of salvation through fixity. Had he lived, he might have changed again. His writing during the war, interestingly enough, draws much less on his masculinist rhetoric to defend his position. Now that he was one of Henley’s men of action, a real fighting man, he had less need to do so. His political views have also shifted; he sees himself in sympathy with the seventeenth-century Levellers. Although he continues to denounce the liberal version of democracy, he supports, he says, democracy if the

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word is used to imply ‘the true doctrine that all men are equal’ (CW, p. 246). He even expresses doubts about the Action Française – is their reactionary programme really a version of the German belief in the organic state? He is, contra Levenson, less authoritarian than he was earlier. Epstein said of Hulme, ‘What appealed to me particularly in him was the vigour and sincerity of his thought. He was as capable of kicking a theory as a man downstairs when the occasion demanded’ (Epstein, 1960, p. vii). What is admirable in Hulme is his passionate quest for understanding, even if one might not admire as much as Epstein the belligerence with which he pursued it. What has to be acknowledged is that the questions he asked, about the parameters of human knowledge, about the distortions of cultural bias, about ethical values, remain central today.

Notes 1

All references to Hulme’s work are to Karen Csengeri’s The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, apart from the two poems quoted from Alun R. Jones’s The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme. 2 See Csengeri, Hulme, p. xxxiv, and T. E. Hulme, Selected Writings, Patrick McGuinness (ed.), pp. viii. 3 See Michael North, Reading 1922 and my discussion of ‘Modernist Otherism’ in Helen Carr, Inventing the American Primitive. 4 Hulme would later complain that Nietzsche’s philosophical contribution was ignored, arguing that ‘the metaphysical part of Nietzsche, generally neglected, is the root of all his ideas’ (CW, p. 86). 5 Quoted in Csengeri, Hulme, p. xxviii. 6 Although she acknowledges that Hulme had read Bergson by 1907, Csengeri rather surprisingly suggests Hulme only turns to Bergson after his period as a poet, and that Bergson made him lose interest in poetry. This does not seem feasible to me, given the internal evidence of Hulme’s writings, as I hope I shall demonstrate. See Csengeri, Hulme, p. xvi. 7 The importance of Hulme’s association with the Tour Eiffel in the development of Imagism has been much debated. I think myself he played a significant role, but as far as Pound himself was concerned, it was their friendship during the autumn of 1911 that was the crucial period. See Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Pound, H.D. and the Imagist Movement. 8 This last image actually appears to be reworked from a poem about the prairies, in which the speaker thinks enviously that ‘Somewhere the gods/ (the blanket-makers of the prairie)/ Sleep in their blankets’ (Jones, 1960, p. 24). 9 The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme appeared on 25 January 1912; Csengeri dates ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ on internal evidence to late 1911 or early 1912. 10 This is another paraphrase of Worringer, who had written, ‘the spirit’s fear of the unknown and the unknowable not only created the first gods, it also created the first art’ (1953, pp. 131-2). 11 ‘Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas.’ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. L. Brunschveig, section 4, no. 277. (This is the edition that Hulme used.) ‘Tragic vision’ is the phrase used of Pascal by Lucien Goldmann, in the title of his book The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine.

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‘Le silence eternal de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.’ Pascal, Pensées, section 3, no. 206. See Helen Carr, ‘Imagism and Empire’. On gender and modernism more generally, see Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), The Gender of Modernism and Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity; on modernist misogyny see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land. Hal Foster has written illuminatingly on the links between primitivism, male modernist anxieties and psychic armouring in ‘“Primitive” Scenes’, Critical Inquiry, and ‘Prosthetic Gods’, Modernism/Modernity. 14 Quoted in Trotter, Paranoid Modernism, p. 164. 15 The ‘abject’ is a term developed by Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection; see my discussion of Kristeva’s abject in Helen Carr, Jean Rhys, pp. 69-70. 13

Chapter 6

Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism Jesse Matz

Writers experiment with time in order to defy ‘public’ time, clock time, linearity – to explore the subjective or cosmic flux falsified by the rules of standardized temporalities: this has been the conventional wisdom at least since the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884, since the routinization of worktime and the discovery of relativity, developments whose immediate effects have been well-documented by E. P. Thompson, Stephen Kern, and others, and whose larger effects have shaped a literary culture given to temporal subversion. To subvert public time, in the interest of liberating and promoting personal, idiosyncratic, ‘human’ temporalities, has indeed been considered one of the definitive goals of experimental writing; counteracting modernity has, for writers, mainly meant counteracting its lock-step temporal trajectories, or making its ruptures opportunities for therapeutic departures into subjective disorder. In Proust, Faulkner, Mann, and Woolf – to name just a few writers – we get major literary experiment to the degree that we get ‘private’ time, in reaction against the conventional tendency of literary form to ally itself with public regulation. And even beyond modernism the subversion of public time (and its related chronologies) has become synonymous with temporal or even human authenticity. Postmodernism pushes that subversion further (even derealizing history itself, and making private time more fully subject to speculative disorientation); popular culture encourages ecstatic departures of all kinds; and authenticity itself often virtually means refusal to go along with the time of the clock. But this utterly naturalized distinction between private and public time, this fetishization of temporal rupture, has led to serious misunderstandings and underestimations not only of modernist temporalities, but of the very possibilities of creative temporal agency. Modernism’s rejection of clock-time, for example, forced an unfortunate forgetting of what classic narrative had learned and taught about the experimental creativity entailed in linearity: to clock a chronology out of chaos had been a great and peculiar achievement for ‘traditional’ writers whose plots only later came to look like normative trajectories. Public time may have been a force for standardization, routinization, and work-discipline, but it also informed countercultural histories and surprising commemorations. Most importantly, even modernist temporalities themselves were never simply geared

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toward undoing linearities and freeing up subjective flux; rather, they most often aimed at finding ways to correlate or to reconcile temporalities growing ever more disparate under the fragmenting effects of modernity. But the public/private distinction and the fetishization of temporal rupture have tended to obscure all this – to lump very different kinds of temporal experiment together into the category of private time, to demonize all public temporalities, and to rule out recognition of the way experimental temporalities have most often labored to deconstruct this very distinction. The received wisdom on time, running from modernism’s romantic origins to its contemporary legacy, pits our private reality of flux (or the cosmic proof of chaos) against our public chronological compulsions and effectively measures human being by the extent to which the former can subvert the latter. What has been lost to us, evacuated by the force of this opposition, is real insight into the reasons for temporal experiment in literature, and, more generally, useful understanding of what must happen for people to gain a comprehensive temporal competency. Private time’s overdetermined authenticity has made it a psychological, aesthetic, and ideological good at the expense of a whole range of possibilities, in a range of disciplinary, practical, and conceptual fields of inquiry and activity. Linearity, for example, as instantiated in the ‘traditional’ realist novel, has lately been vital to cognitive psychology, but the unassailable authenticity of temporal rupture has driven a wedge between this psychological practice and aesthetic culture, so that cultural critics can only see these cognitive psychologists as naïve agents of a disciplinary regime.1 And time’s essential sociality – its origin in ‘otherness’, explained in different ways by Emmanuel Levinas and Cornelius Castoriadis – has never emerged as a viable pattern in the writing and reading of experimental prose, where the bias naturally goes against appreciation of shared temporal construction. In these and many other alternative ways of practicing or conceiving temporal experiment, we get a far more complete sense of the way temporal theory and practice might lead to a host of psychological, aesthetic, and political advantages. Above all, we get the sense – essentially ruled out by the private/public distinction – that truly useful and interesting temporal experiment entails a speculative mingling of temporalities. We see compromise where the distinction would enforce opposition, and in the context of this compromise, two further advantages emerge: first, a better sense of how temporal experiment in literature might actually participate in the enrichment of the human life in time; second, a more accurate understanding of the temporalities at work in literary modernism more specifically. For insofar as literature patterns this compromise among temporalities, it models reconciliations absolutely vital to life within modernity. Insofar as we recognize the nature and critical function of this compromise, we see it (instead of ‘private’ time alone) at work even among those modernist writers most apparently responsible for the ascendancy of private temporality. In The Sound and the Fury, for example, the breaking of watches and streamof-consciousness derealizations would seem to mark departure into private time and to imply absolute distinctions between time in the mind and time in the world. But Faulkner in fact models an effort to collect private temporalities into some

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alternative public measure – to make a range of subjective alternatives, by its range, proof that public discourse can strike a balance among the mind’s conflicting temporalities. Subjective time is the time of madness and mania; the novel tries for something more, through its own power to contrast subjective times within a temporal object, and presents this object to us as a means through which we, too, might manage the temporal chaos of modern life. To the Lighthouse puts time objectively passing into tension with time subjectively looping to get ultimately at art’s compromise version of time. It only seems to prefer the subjective ‘moment’ to ‘time passing’ until we reach the novel’s third alternative, in which subjective and objective time join in a work of art made to help us strike a similar balance. The Magic Mountain looks perpetually for points at which to insert timeless subjectivities into history; and similarly most works apparently given to subversive exploration of private, subjective temporalities are really looking for forms of compromise – ways to make subjective temporality key into the temporal measures of history, sociality, and other public forms of time. And yet the critical heritage has tended to see in these and other writers ‘a liberation from the enslaving temporal paradigms of experience’, a revolt against time that is abstract, fixed, or absolute, when in fact modernist writing most often works against just such total liberation toward reconciliations that might close the gaps created by modernity’s temporal differentiation (Hollington, 1976, p. 432).2 Why, if compromise is the goal and the better outcome, have critical and cultural history tended to single out private time, and to make its subversive exploration so much the key feature of literary experiment and human authenticity? Among the many possible causes, one stands out, if not as most fundamental, then at least as most historically decisive: the peculiar influence of the time-philosophy of Henri Bergson. It was Bergson who established a very influential temporal duality: ‘real’ time was private, subjective time – the time of ‘duration’, the flux of the inner soul; false time was public, spatial, extensive time – that of chronology, linearity, and practical life; and the two could not, at least according to most of Bergson’s readers, mix. When they did so, public time would always win out, so that even the most extravagant of literary experiments could only gesture at the shadow of real, inner human time. Nevertheless, a host of writers tried for duration, or at least gave the world the impression that temporal authenticity depended upon it. And even if Bergson’s popularity was temporary, he established a habit of dualism that proved very hard to break. It was Bergson who hypostatized the radical split between time in the mind and time in the world, and convinced a key set of cultural arbiters, at least for a time, that aesthetic culture ought to try for radical departures into pure temporal subjectivity. He was not the cause of the modernist interest in time itself, of course, but of this key habit of association whereby authenticity came to depend upon the temporal subversion enabled by departure into radical temporal subjectivity. But Bergson’s legacy here was based on a misunderstanding. Temporal dualism was by no means essential to Bergson’s theory of time. It derived from certain sentimental or romantic explanations, used by Bergson mainly to dramatize his theories, and from reliance mainly on his earliest explanations of the need for distinction between different temporal

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manifolds. In the mature theory, expressed most clearly in Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson in fact describes the basis for a kind of compromise among the temporalities put into dualistic opposition by some readers and in his eventual legacy. Had this compromise been more fully recognized, and had it become as popular as Bergson’s far less central doctrines and explanations, private time alone certainly would not have achieved its unfortunate ideological dominance over our aesthetic experiments and our conceptions of authentic human temporality. Few readers of Bergson read him carefully enough, however, to make this kind of difference. For the most part, the ‘cult of Bergson’ guaranteed widespread misunderstanding of him, due to the way temporal dualism naturally fed and indulged early twentieth-century anxieties about the routinization of modern life.3 There were exceptions, however, and this is where T. E. Hulme comes in. Hulme read Bergson with harrowing thoroughness, as is well known, and in fact he seems to have redoubled his reading of Bergson upon finding himself uncertain about precisely those aspects of Bergson’s time-philosophy key to the present argument.4 In Matter and Memory, Bergson crucially mitigates the dualism that led to the fetishization of private time; coming upon this revision, Hulme read around for help understanding it, and ultimately became convinced that the popular reading of Bergson was wrong. What followed might have been a correction critical to cultural history – one which might have militated powerfully against the bad effects of a century of temporal duality. What might have followed was a critical compromise, which Hulme gestures at but never delivers. How and why he discovered this compromise but never spelled it out is the main subject of this essay, for this near correction of a century’s bad temporal duality is not only a very telling symptom of modern temporal culture, but a telling shortfall in Hulme’s career as theorist. Hulme gestures at his compromise in his 1911 essay ‘Bergson, Balfour, and Politics’. At the end of the essay, Hulme reflects on the controversy over the political implications of Bergson’s theories about the reality of time – the controversy that had by this time convinced him that Bergson’s theories constituted ‘nothing but the last disguise of romanticism’ (CW, p. xix). In Hulme’s account, romantic revolutionaries and other radical leftist progressives had taken Bergson’s theory as a reason to see history as a process of perpetual revolution: if it was ‘real’, then time brought new change at every moment and thus cut the present off from historical precedent. Bergson had therefore become license for a dangerous irrationalism. Such was the view Hulme took from Bergson’s right-wing critics, principally Charles Maurras and Pierre Lasserre, for whom Bergson was not only the leading example of French romanticism in general, but a very direct inspiration to those aspects of left-wing irrationalism that made any alliance against the Republic impossible. Certain elements of the Right would ultimately find a way to incorporate Bergsonism – indeed, as Mark Antliff has argued, the ‘romantic fascism’ of interwar Germany even linked Bergson to Nazi ideology – but at this stage Bergsonian vitalism seemed mainly to endorse a leftist romanticism for which no necessary laws govern society and it is ‘useless . . . to search in the past for general truths which shall be applicable to the present’ (CW, p. 165).5

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Wanting to oppose this extreme romanticism, and this extreme application of Bergson to progressive politics, Hulme at least temporarily considered a way to limit the reality of time to the subjective realm. At the end of the essay, he writes, ‘I can find a compromise for myself, however, which I roughly indicate by saying that I think time is real for the individual, but not for the race’ (CW, p. 165). Time could be a matter of perpetual innovation at the level of individual subjectivity and yet be unreal – abstracted, regularized, constant – at the level of public life. But what would this compromise entail? Hulme wrote that he would ‘try in a later article to work out the consequences of this’ (CW, p. 165) but when he does, his compromise falls well short of what his own understanding of Bergson could have produced. What might it have been? And why, finally, does Hulme revert to a compromise that is no compromise at all – the dualism that he himself insisted entailed a misunderstanding of Bergsonian temporality? Hulme’s compromise began as an effort to bring into line the Bergson he liked with the Bergson he did not. At first, of course, Bergson seemed all good to him: he had found in the theory of the heterogeneous durée a means of escape from the nightmare of determinism, from what he called the ‘chessboard’ mentality that reduced human life and even the human soul to mechanism. Bergson had proven that determinism wrongly projected the form of ‘external manifolds’ into the ‘intensive’ manifold, wrongly subjecting time to space (roughly speaking) and falsifying the freedom with which time actually unfolds or becomes. Intuition into intensive manifolds became Hulme’s method of choice; it freed him from determinism, and, because it seemed the special talent of the artist, bolstered his sense of vocation and his sense of self. But even from the beginning, the implications of Bergson’s theory of time could not square with Hulme’s ethical, social, and political tendency to think in terms of ‘fixity and sameness’ (CW, p. 135): as much as he liked to imagine subjectivity made up of flux, he did not like to think of the ethical or social subject capable of the radical change that the flux would have to entail. His absolutism and conservatism in the social realm, his adherence to absolute values, put him in need of a way to distinguish between time’s personal reality and its unreality for the social or public self. Ultimately this need would result in a simpler all-out rejection of Bergson; Hulme would famously renounce Bergson, even as he maintained a commitment to much of what Bergson’s theories had taught him. But initially the need led Hulme to try for a compromise. The immediate context for the compromise, in and around ‘Bergson, Balfour, and Politics’, was focused proof that left-wing groups had indeed found in Bergson support for their revolutionary zeal. As Robert Ferguson puts it in his recent biography of Hulme, the Bergsonian notion that ‘the present was always a unique present, having no parallels with what had come before’, coupled with the sense that because ‘time is real . . . there can be no repetition’, resulted in an interpretation of time that ‘provided the Left in France with an argument for rejecting the belief that the past can or should provide a model for the present; and a further argument for the consequent need to structure the development of society along idealistic lines through the application of theory’ (2002, p. 88). Leftist

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Bergsonians took time’s reality as their opportunity to disregard precedent, to ignore history, and to conceive of the present as a perpetual crisis, and therefore a time open to any and all possibilities. Moreover, it disproved the view that ‘there are such things as laws governing societies’ and made the present moment subject to applications of social theories based in faith in man’s perfectibility, a faith in turn licensed by a Bergsonian faith that time was essentially innovation (CW, p. 165). Hulme felt that this ‘brand-new good time’ mentality clashed utterly with the truth about man’s incorrigibility, the permanent structure of ‘original sin’, and amounted more or less to neurosis – to a ‘certain irritation of the mind’, a need for a ‘certain kind of mental excitement’ indicative not of any legitimate metaphysical outlook but rather a common weakness ‘raised to a hysterical pitch’ (CW, pp. 12930). It consequently helped to sour him on Bergson, to enhance his own tendency to ‘take tremendous consolation in the idea of fixity’ (CW, p. 135), and to confront him (at least temporarily) with a need to explain how fixity and flux could coexist – and, moreover, how they could collude in a ‘Tory’ social scheme. So Hulme speculated about a way to think time real for the individual but not for the race, and he promised a ‘later article to work out the consequences of this’ (CW, p. 165). That later article, it seems, is ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’, delivered as a series of lectures roughly two weeks after the publication of ‘Bergson, Balfour, and Politics’. Hulme tries here to rescue Bergson from his followers by clarifying his contribution to philosophy – essentially, by making clear two things: first, that Bergson’s main use is methodological (rather than mystical) and is to be found in the intuitional method derived from the theory of intensive manifolds; second, that real time, duration, and the élan vital do not necessarily render all human time free. The latter explanation is crucial. It entails a subtle reassessment; here, at least, Hulme does not yet seem interested in refuting Bergson, but only explaining him with the fullness necessary to refute wrongheaded interpretations of his theories. But the reassessment redirects Bergson substantially enough to change the politics his theories imply. Hulme discovers a Bergson useful to his politics. The effort to do so, however, actually circumvents the real ‘compromise’ Bergson’s work proposes – probably because that available compromise does not lend itself nearly as well to the political outlook to which Hulme might have wanted Bergson to capitulate. At this point, then, there is a fork in the road of Hulme’s theoretical development: in one direction, it leads to the compromise; in the other – the road not taken – it leads (or could have led) further, to the truly synthetic temporality through which Hulme might have made a vital (if less politically useful) contribution to the history of cultural theory. What Hulme writes in ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’ to put Bergson on a more conservative footing is, essentially, that evolution is a process of dissociation. Focusing now on Creative Evolution (1907) and arguing that it solves problems left unsolved in Bergson’s earlier work, Hulme stresses the fact that time’s ‘real’ unfolding and the élan vital through which it expresses itself does not imply any progressive development oriented toward the perfection of life at any level. What happens, as things evolve, is not that they accrue parts and capacities:

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‘Evolution then is not a process of organisation, of building up, but one of dissociation’ because it is a process whereby indetermination injects freedom into matter and scatters the life force into various instantiations (CW, p. 185). This distinction is crucial for Hulme because it lets him have both the ‘free creative activity’ patterned by real time and a sense that this freedom instantiates itself, for all practical purposes, in solid objects – in a world of constancy. In other words, it lets him have freedom without ‘progressive’ implications, and a flux that produces stasis. That such a compromise is his goal here is made clear in the last paragraph of the essay, where Hulme writes that it is important to see Creative Evolution as a necessary counterweight to what Bergson elsewhere implies, since the book enables him ‘to plant all his ideas solidly down on the earth and to show them at work before you in a concrete form, in physical shape. If one were to a certain extent rather exhausted by abstractions, this brings a certain relief. More than that, it gives a certain stability and ballast to the system’ (CW, p. 190). Stabilized, the theory of real time now ends in recognition of time’s unreality in the sphere of practical action, where time’s progressiveness emerges into a kind of randomness that makes the world actually constant. This stability squares with the political view of a world in which ‘the number and types of the possible forms of society are . . . constant’ and in which ‘the only way in which to preserve a good social order is to take definite steps towards [order] by preserving the restraining framework inside which such order is alone possible’ (CW, p. 222). But there are problems with this compromise – problems peculiar enough to suggest that the compromise is not that which Hulme originally envisioned, and not what it could have been. Despite the fact that Hulme claims that his reading of Creative Evolution finds in it something to rationalize and make new sense of the theories Bergson had inadequately explained, the reading more or less recapitulates a dualism available in Bergson right from the start. The dualism is a problem not only because Hulme himself had tended to dislike the way people misread Bergson as a dualistic philosopher, but because it in fact heightens Bergson’s romanticism – the very thing Hulme needed to root out in order to make Bergson make actual sense. From the beginning, Bergson had said that intellect falsifies time for good practical reasons: Time and Free Will (1889) notes repeatedly that the tendency to mistake time for space – to measure intensive manifolds as if they were extensive, to hypostatize time’s heterogeneity into the homogeneity of space – is vital to human survival. Human beings must make their way in space; space is their practical environment, and so the intellect must naturally gear itself spatially and subject the luxury of temporal freedom to the necessity of spatial engagement: ‘As the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, consciousness prefers it, and gradually loses sight of its fundamental self’ (Bergson, 1910, p. 128). This recognition is virtually identical with the reading of Bergson that Hulme claims to derive only once Creative Evolution comes along. But this error is not the problem itself; it is but a symptom of the real problem, which is the fact that Hulme lets himself fall back into dualistic thinking, and does so because he overlooks the moment in Bergson’s work in which the true opportunity – for

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compromise, for a more congenial politics, and for the truly advantageous view of time – emerges. What is surprising about this mistake is that it happens even despite Hulme’s rare readiness to avoid it. Dualism in Bergson (and in the interpretation of his theories) is almost entirely a result of sentimentality. Distinguishing between real time and spatial time, the durée and the time we live by the clock, Bergson tends to add a speciously sentimental ethical bias to what ought to be a more neutral metaphysical distinction. Arguing that real time gets falsified in and by our practical engagements with the world, Bergson tends also to say that such practical engagements diminish us – limiting the freedom of our human souls, reducing a wealth of mystical openness to a poor ordinary existence. In the theory itself, however, there is nothing that ought to license this superadded ethical distinction, and ironically it ends up diverting Bergson from more important conclusions. Take, for example, this passage from Time and Free Will, in which Bergson describes the ‘theory of two selves’ which would become so important to his popular following: Hence there are finally two different selves, one of which is, as it were, the external projection of the other, its spatial and, so to speak, social representation. . . . [T]he moments at which we . . . grasp ourselves are rare, and that is just why we are rarely free. The greater part of the time we live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost, a colourless shadow which pure duration projects into homogenous space. Hence our life unfolds in space rather than in time; we live for the external world rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than think; we ‘are acted’ rather than act ourselves. To act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure duration. (Bergson, 1910, pp. 231-2)

Authentic temporal selfhood is nearly always submerged within the false spatial self: here Bergson makes a distinction of obvious appeal, especially to the modernist sensibility, but one of little necessary relevance to his theory of temporality. For in the more elaborate theory, space and time create a necessary tension; they become, for Bergson, object and subject, matter and memory, and, as such, the twin poles of consciousness. Here, however, they devolve into a fairly cheap ethics, a simplistic existentialism. They also do so with some fairly bad results. In this distinction between the ‘different selves’ we get one very influential source of the notion that distinguishes authentic private time from inauthentic public time – the notion allegedly behind so much modernist narrative experimentation but in fact as unnecessary to it as it was to Bergson’s metaphysics. We get that distinction, instead of the compromise which (as we will see) might have been a better source and measure of modernist temporalities as well as a better basis for the kind of compromise Hulme’s politics made him desire. Dualism in Bergson, then, is a product of sentimentality – Bergson’s own, and that of the following eager to make his theory into a kind of mystical romanticism through which to rediscover essential selfhood. That Hulme should have perpetuated it is strange because he was, for two reasons, ready to reject it: he himself disliked Bergson’s sentimentality and planned to develop his compromise

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by excising it from Bergson’s theory; and he did the detailed reading necessary to find the key moment in the theory in which suspension of sentimentality enabled Bergson to get at the truth about the human life in time. When he mentions his compromise in ‘Bergson, Balfour, and Politics’, Hulme notes that reaching it ‘means that one has to cut all the sentiments expressed at the ends of Bergson’s chapters, but it preserves most of the essentials’ (CW, p. 165). Hulme shows himself uniquely aware of the fact that sentimentality does in fact skew Bergson’s theories – that his romanticization of the inner self, his suggestions about the free soul in duration are not at all essential to those theories, and might in fact keep them from extending to their fuller range of implications. When Hulme elsewhere considers his discontent with Bergson, he recognizes that it might derive from inadequate understanding of those elements of Bergson less open to easy sentimental understanding. In ‘Bax on Bergson’ he writes: ‘Some four or five years ago, before “Evolution Créatrice” appeared, and when I had only read “Matière et Mémoire”, being convinced that I had not quite grasped everything that Bergson had meant in that book, I started on a definite search for every criticism of any importance that had appeared on him. I thought I could ensure in this way that I should not, from a too hasty picking out of that one of Bergson’s ideas which I had understood most easily from my own reading, jump to the conclusion that this was the central and important part of Bergson’ (CW, p. 116). Further reading should have put Hulme’s understanding of Bergson beyond the hasty, easy focus on what was in fact not central and important, but his later writing suggests that he remained focused on the sentimental dualism inessential to the theory, and that even despite reading all the criticism, Hulme failed to find what he needed where it was: in Matter and Memory after all, where Bergson presents his classic argument unusually free of sentimental bias. Hulme, in other words, wanted to resist the sentimental dualism that romanticized real time; and he read around enough to find the means to do it; but nevertheless he tended completely to disregard what Matter and Memory has to say about the way that real time and practical life necessarily collude, despite the fact that the explanation could have been key to a revaluation of Bergson. How does Matter and Memory strike the critical compromise? What had seemed a dualistic theory, through which temporality divided off into irreconcilable modes, here becomes a matter of what John Mullarkey notes is the ‘reciprocal interpenetration’ more actually characteristic of Bergson’s way of thinking (1999, p. 11). Private and public times interpenetrate, and even enable each other; compromise between them is not only possible, but what enables the extreme of each. How this all works is complicated, and something that takes far more extensive and complex explanation than the simpler situation described in Bergson’s earlier work (or at least the simpler theory of time popularized in the ‘cult of Bergson’). But the key dynamic – the critical point of compromise, the essential thing Hulme wanted to detach from Bergson’s sentimentality and what it would inspire in the larger ‘time-cult’ – is the dynamic interaction between memory and perception. As Bergson defines these categories, it seems as if they must oppose each

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other, the former allying with the temporal flux that defines the true self, the latter enabling us to act practically in space (and forcing us to submerge and repress true temporal selfhood). The opposition here would seem to endorse what people have tended always to make of Bergson, encouraging departures from practical spatial action into the more creative flux of time. Think of Proust, for example, and his efforts to immerse himself in the flux of memory, and the critical crux and its apparent line of influence emerge with some clarity. Think of Proust’s resistance to Bergson’s popularized ideas, however, which is in fact similar to Hulme’s, and the essence of Bergson emerges instead.6 For it is only when Bergson lapses into his sentimentality that his opposite categories oppose each other. Only when he tries to make his theories a mystical creed does he write, for example: ‘To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream. Man alone is capable of such an effort . . .’ (1991, pp. 82-3). Much more essential to the theory than this mysticism is Bergson’s interest in the interactions of perception and memory (rather than the way the latter must somehow withdraw from the former). Elsewhere, for example, Bergson gets at the true (if less compelling) implications of his theory, and when he does so, he more or less admits that his own will toward withdrawal is a common error: ‘Here again distinct perception and memory-image are taken in the static condition, as things of which the first is supposed to be already complete without the second; whereas we ought to consider the dynamic progress by which the one passes into the other’ (1991, p. 127). This dynamic progress strikes a compromise between memory and perception, time and space, subject and object, in which the memory-image is a point of critical mediation. Often overlooked or forgotten in accounts of Bergson’s theories and influence, always neglected when Bergson’s followers wanted to derive a mystical creed from his work, the ‘memory-image’ shows Bergson not engaged in sentimental or romantic dualism, not engaged in a therapeutic or ethical programme that would require withdrawal from the world of practical action into some realm of full freedom, and not legitimating ahistorical indulgence in some perpetually new present. The compromise of the ‘memory-image’ leads not in these directions but toward very different ideas about the relations among time, history, politics, and aesthetic effort. As we will now see, Hulme himself was preparing to go in this other direction; he had already been preparing, and had become well-known for, aesthetic theories that could have substantially aided the modernist project; and had he worked out his compromise, and enabled it to extend the influence he had already had, the project of modernism might well have developed, through an alternative modernist temporality, a more engaged politics and a more lasting sphere of aesthetic influence. In Matter and Memory, Bergson seems to draw two very different conclusions on the basis of what he discovers about matter, memory, and the intervention between them of the memory-image. On the one hand, he concludes that the balance struck by the memory-image enables human health and happiness; insofar as there is this balance, the mind functions well and is able to meet both practical

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needs and enrich practical, present life with the wisdom and beauty of past experience. On the other hand, however, he discusses the need to upset the balance in question and to free memory from matter, time from space, and undo the work naturally done by the memory-image. Freedom, and free action, depend on such an unbalancing. But just why one would seek such freedom – what makes it desirable, or useful – remains unclear; Bergson simply lets the word ‘freedom’ and its implicit positive significance, do the work of argument, even despite the fact that his arguments for balance have been otherwise so convincing. This second sort of conclusion must have been what really prompted Hulme’s objections, because it is here that an adventitious romanticism skews what is otherwise a theory rigorously neutral in its ethical or political implications. Once freedom comes into the picture, metaphysics becomes ethics, of a specious variety. When, for example, Bergson discusses the relationship between perception and action and the way necessity subjects perception to homogeneous time, he notes, ‘if there are actions that are really free, or at least partly indeterminate, they can only belong to beings able to fix, at long intervals, that becoming to which their own becoming clings, able to solidify it into distinct moments, and so to condense matter and, by assimilating it, to digest it into movements of reaction which will pass through the meshes of natural necessity’ (1991, p. 210). His purpose here is to stress the reciprocity of necessity and freedom, and his use of the term ‘free’ is metaphysical or psychological. At times, however, Bergson will let the term ‘free’ conflate with its meaning in the language of ethics or politics, so that a term meant strictly to describe a psychological process takes on the implications of an ethical good or a political right.7 Such conflation, however, is never really theorized in Bergson’s work (or by the Bergsonians won over by it); it remains a specious one, motivated by sentimentality, and always likely, as Hulme knew, to derail Bergsonism into simplistic romanticism. So it must have been Hulme’s intention – in order to recuperate Bergson, and legitimize his own interest in the philosopher – to distinguish the specious romantic ethics of freedom from the more essential ‘balance’ or compromise Bergson otherwise strikes through the function of the memory-image. The sentimentality he opposed would have been the unwarranted enthusiasm for ‘freedom’ and the romanticism that turned rigorous psychological distinctions into very questionable license to withdrawal from the realm of practical action. To say, then, that time is real for the individual but not for the race, and to seek a compromise on this basis, one that would do without the sentimental implications of Bergsonian temporality, would have meant finding a kind of ‘reciprocal interpenetration’ parallel to the memory-image and conceiving a mitigated dualism like that which Bergson discovered between memory and perception. But it would also have meant widening this compromise into the realm of social theory: for the unreality of public time to take part in Bergson’s reciprocity, for it to have a role to play in the compromise, Hulme would have had to widen the circle drawn by Bergsonian psychology, extending what Bergson calls ‘perception’ from the realm of individual action to the realm of public (or ‘racial’) accomplishment. Two things about this extension are key: first, that it would have enabled theoretical insight

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into the kind of modernist temporality actually at work in that modernist writing too often reduced to representation of personal, subjective, or private time, by showing that such representation must always be but half of the more vital effort to reconcile opposed temporalities; second, it would have given Hulme’s aesthetics a different politics – one which, through its rapprochement with Bergson, would have entailed a very different race-theory from that attributed most often to Hulme’s later and most characteristic way of thinking. But Hulme seems to have skimmed past the memory-image and the role it might have played in a compromise between private and public time. The moment of oversight is reflected in that moment in ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’ when Hulme turns from his discussion of Matter and Memory to his discussion of Creative Evolution, without having fully explored or explained what in the former book might make it an advance upon Bergson’s typical representation of the agon of inner and outer time. He does note the crucial intervention enacted in the memory image: ‘How much we shall learn from the movements of the actors will depend on the nature of the play – nearly everything if it is a pantomime, very little at all if it is a comedy. So with a man’s brain. If he is pursuing a course of abstract reasoning we should be able to tell nothing at all from the state of his brain; but if, on the contrary, his mind was occupied with a distinct visual image, or was just preparing to act, we should know nearly everything’ (CW, pp. 183-4). Hulme next explains why such full knowledge would come from fixing attention upon the middle ground occupied by the visual image, and here his use of the word ‘interpenetration’ indicates near understanding of the significance of this mediation: ‘. . . the whole of your past life is in the present. The inner stream which composes your inner self bears in it not the whole of your past in the form of completed pictures, but bears it in the form of potentiality. In this stream the elements are, as we have said, interpenetrated. All that happens in an act of recognition is that the interpenetrated parts get separated out’ (CW, p. 184). But Hulme fails to see how ‘potentiality’ as he describes it would extend ‘interpenetration’ from the realm of the interior manifold into the interaction between the interior and the exterior. The potential image (or the memory image) is what the intensive manifold makes available to practical perception and action; it is what practical perception and action prompt from the intensive manifold, and how the flux of real time is shaped into the time of public life.8 Had Hulme lingered over the process, he would have found his compromise in that moment in which the individual participates in public structures. But instead he moves on to the account of evolution, within which he finds the different kind of compromise, focused far less productively on the way the randomness of ‘dissociation’ disallows the sort of progress that makes time real for the individual. What if Hulme had not done this? What if he had made the memory-image his way of saying how time is real for the individual but not for the race, and of saying so in such a way as to make time’s unreality and reality ‘reciprocal’? He might have discovered, first of all, a better theory of the artist. Hulme’s Bergsonian theory of the nature and role of the artist depends heavily upon the theory of the two selves. Bergson held (in some of his more sentimental moments) that although

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most of us cannot help but let the reality of time give way to the false, outer self of practical action, some people have the power to disrupt that concession. As we have seen, he felt that some people naturally find their inner selves less substantially attached to the compulsions of outer activity, and Hulme found in this possibility a fine source of inspiration. As he writes in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, Bergson suggests that ‘from time to time by a happy accident men are born who either in one of their senses, or in their conscious life as a whole, are less dominated by necessities of action. Nature has forgotten to attach their faculty for perception to their faculty for action. They do not perceive simply for the purposes of action: they perceive just for the sake of perceiving’ (CW, p. 196). These natural aesthetes are natural artists; through them, Hulme found an inspiring, even natural justification for his own cultural work. But such work was thusly conceived in stale romantic terms. Freedom from the necessity of action, and the visionary status it could confer, would make of the Hulmean artist nothing more than what aesthetes had long thought themselves to be, and, more importantly, would do nothing to give the artist a necessary role to play within the changing scheme of modernity. But the compromise endorsed by the memory-image would have relocated the Hulmean artist to a more significant position. Were the artist allied not with intensive freedom from practical action but instead the mediatory moment of ‘potentiality’ (that moment when extensive action selects from intensive duration and duration proffers from its flux images to shape extensive action) the artist could gain authority over all the manifest properties of form. The free artist, in other words, may be only a formless one – defined precisely in terms of liberty from the perceptual structures that must also be those of aesthetic intervention. Primitive openness is this artist’s talent, even if it is a talent that must conflict with enclosures of aesthetic action. But the alternative embodied in the memory-image would theorize an artist at once freshly perceptive and capable of aesthetic discrimination. It would designate an artist in charge of elemental abstraction, specially able to isolate that moment in which potential imagery gets shaped into the actual forms of human perception and judgment. Bergson himself describes something like this alternative, in language enough like that which Hulme uses in his discussion of Bergson’s theory of art to make the difference starkly clear: ‘If there are actions that are truly free, or at least partly indeterminate, they can only belong to beings able to fix, at long intervals, that becoming to which their own becoming clings, able to solidify it into distinct moments, and so to condense matter and, by assimilating it, to digest it into moments of reaction which will pass through the meshes of natural necessity’ (Bergson, 1991, p. 210). Bergson is not concerned specifically with the artist here, but the ‘being’ he describes is the same as that which Hulme identifies in order to discuss the artist’s psychology. Here, however, that psychology is largely about fixing, solidity, and condensing. This alternative dynamic would entail far more than the merely notional, negative activity involved in freedom from the necessities of action. It would entail openness instead to experience that would also be a sign of something to do, some real act of forming that could be the real work of art.

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Sanford Schwartz has argued that Hulme found this kind of dynamic by combining the aesthetic theories of Bergson and Nietzsche: ‘we can say that Hulme combines Bergson’s emphasis on the recovery of immediate experience with Nietzsche’s emphasis on the production of new metaphors or models’ (1985, p. 62). From Bergson, Schwartz argues, Hulme got a way to see aesthetic perception as something free of intellectual impositions, and from Nietzsche he got something very different: a way to involve form, after all, as an engine of aesthetic innovation. But explaining Hulme’s aesthetic theory as this kind of hybrid raises but does not answer the question of the relationship between ‘models’ and ‘immediate experience’: once models are in play, they must inhibit immediate experience, unless some synthetic theory of their relationship explains a point of perpetual dynamic contact between them. No such theory can come out of a combination only of two different philosophers’ influence. When Schwartz writes that the combination suggested to Hulme how ‘artistic abstractions actually restore to us concrete experience by illuminating aspects of the sensory flux we have previously failed to observe’ (1985, p. 61), he describes the sort of dynamic Hulme might have derived from Bergson, but by seeing it as a product of separate theoretical systems, he leaves its full integration unexplained, and leaves the Hulmian artist yet torn between form and freedom. Had Hulme resolved this conflict, he might in fact have theorized an artist capable of what Schwartz describes – capable of making ‘immediate experience, poetic metaphor, and artistic abstraction . . . all interrelated aspects of a single program’ (1985, p. 62). Such an artist could also be responsible for selecting and cultivating what traces of real time could become the forms of history. The interpenetration of private and public times entailed in the memory image could link up not only the individual and the race, but the individual artist and the world of public action and record. This link could have strengthened the kinds of connections Hulme tends to draw between classicism in art and sound political thinking. For the most part, Hulme’s political views commit him to aesthetic restrictions that even he finds too extreme; frequently in his literary criticism he must qualify the distinctions determined by his politics with special dispensations for the vagaries of aesthetic subjectivity. But it would not have been necessary to do so if the individual and the race reciprocated through the kind of temporal mediator Bergson describes in the memory image. The romantic and classic could have been two interpenetrating moments in a single subjectivity’s aesthetic creation. And then constancy, discontinuity, and absolute values could have been seen as public determinants happy to interact with the flux of change romantically conceived. Their absolutism, in a sense, would have been mitigated in a way Hulme might have liked: discipline would then have become less a matter of inhuman abstraction and more a matter of truly historical forms – of rules, that is, shaped through the human history of practical action. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is peculiar for the way it ultimately promotes just this reciprocity, even through the provision Bergson makes for it, but still puts the ‘romantic’ and the ‘classic’ into agonistic opposition. The essay as a whole suggests that the romantic attitude – that ‘spilt religion’ which holds man to be an

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‘infinite reservoir of possibilities’ and entails aesthetic extravagance – derives from its own theory of man and keeps to its own historical moment (CW pp. 62, 61). Even if it involves itself dialectically with the classical attitude, Hulme presents it (at least here) as an opposite alternative no classicist could inhabit, affectively, historically, or aesthetically. As ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ draws to its end, however, Hulme implicitly arrives at the point of productive connection between the two attitudes. He has been saying that classical verse need not be ‘dry’ in the wrong way – that indeed it attains to the ‘essence of poetry’ through its sincere, strict mode of aesthetic contemplation (CW, p. 69). It does so, Hulme argues, through ‘intuition’, a mode that sounds romantic only until Hulme invokes Bergson to define it. It is not some mere feeling, not some vague and romantic impressionism, but a powerful way of seizing things whole. ‘Now this is all worked out in Bergson’, Hulme writes, referring to the theory of intensive manifolds, which helps him define the classical attitude not as cold intellectual discrimination but as intuitive precision – what happens, for example, when ‘a powerfully imaginative mind seizes and combines at the same instant all the important ideas of its poem or picture, and while it works with one of them . . . is at the same time working with and modifying all their relations to it and never losing sight of their bearings on each other’ (CW, p. 72). ‘Intuition’ of this kind enables Hulme to meet potential objections by giving the classical attitude something of the romantic imagination, and it is no coincidence that Bergson provides the point of contact here, given what we have seen of Bergson’s tendency toward just such compromise. But because Hulme has not fully gone into the compromise in question, it does not characterize his whole treatment of the relationship between these two attitudes: ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ tends toward literary history rather than aesthetic psychology, holding mainly that ‘after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival’ (CW, p. 59), because it does not expand upon the means by which it might have made the dynamic in question here a far tighter dialectic. Conversely, history does not get the benefit of the compromise. As long as Hulme believed that time must be either real or unreal, he tended to think of historical time as either free or fixed and consequently to polarize political options that could combine, as Hulme of course knew, in the production of historical change. Such a view of political history might have been what Hulme had in mind when he wrote in ‘Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’, after dismissing attempts to make Bergson stand for democracy: ‘I do not propose here to examine the really interesting theory of democracy that can be got out of Bergson’ (CW, p. 163). The really interesting theory might have been one that paid better attention to the way freedom interacts with fixity in Bergson’s metaphysics – not in such a way as to valorize freedom at all costs and to legitimize democracy so radical as to be impracticable, but in such a way as to explain how institutions and rules develop that very needfully limit democracy to systems of order. Had Hulme found the true middle ground in Bergson between the ‘chessboard’ and utter change, he might not have had to be, as Roger Kimball puts it, ‘as politically incorrect, avant la lettre, as it was possible to be’ (1997, p. 22): his ‘Tory disposition’ and his ‘horror of

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change’ might not have been so strongly harassed by the evidence of social change around him, and he might have found himself in political positions less likely to land him on the fringes of social life.9 All this counterfactual speculation, however, deliberately avoids two facts: Hulme’s disposition naturally led him to the fringes, and perhaps naturally led him away from conciliatory solutions, even despite his impatience with dualistic thinking. And that oppositional disposition was natural also to Hulme’s moment, explaining why not only he but modernism’s cultural arbiters more generally would have wanted to overlook the possibility of temporal reciprocity and dwell instead in temporal binarism. Why exactly did Hulme miss the chance for real compromise – this compromise that might have made him a better artist and a more subtle political thinker? And why, and at what cost, have our cultures of temporal experiment likewise missed their chance? Hulme probably missed his chance mainly because he cared less about actually finding a way to reconcile real time and public time than about discrediting the temporality of progressive politics. Once that temporality had become associated with Bergson, there was little practical reason to try to undo the association with what would have to seem, to the public, hair-splitting distinctions. The damage had been done, and done to Hulme himself, too, who cannily knew to concern himself more with reputations, publicity, and general impressions than some of the niceties of philosophy and theory. So it is probably wrong to say that Hulme misread Bergson. His failure to find in Bergson temporal reconciliation, and its corollary aesthetic and political compromises, was certainly less a failure of understanding than a choice of emphasis, and one motivated by the knowledge that the public would always fail to understand Bergson, no matter how much someone like Hulme read, re-read, and explained him. However useful Bergson might have been to a synthetic temporal theory, he was useless to any effort to make such a theory publicly effective, so pronounced was the tendency of the ‘cult of Bergson’ (and what Wyndham Lewis would call the ‘time-cult’) to see the philosopher as the romantic savior of the modern soul. Hulme’s close brush with the temporal synthesis Bergson describes in Matter and Memory and other texts is therefore symptomatic. This particular aspect of his relationship to Bergson is interesting not only because it marks the telling absence of a turning point in Hulme’s own career, but also because it calls our attention to a larger such absence in cultural history. It does so because Hulme’s intellectual shuffle here was, in a sense, but an extreme version of what has often taken place when the question of temporal experiment comes up. More than most of his contemporaries and immediate successors, Hulme was well-read in temporal philosophies, and likely to understand subtle yet very consequential distinctions among time-frames and temporal structures. More than most, he was also subject to what in Bergson could lead either toward temporal dualism or its opposite. And more than many he had influence – a power to act as what he himself called a ‘centre of publicity’, so that if you were to ‘hitch an idea’ onto him it might ‘vibrate to the four corners of the globe’ (CW, p. 160). He was, more clearly if not more completely, what Proust, Faulkner, Mann, and others were to temporal culture as well, and thus he can help us see what they also were to the history of

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time in the twentieth century. For these writers, too, were inspired by a philosopher they misunderstood; they produced work that demonstrates an intuitive understanding of Bergson’s temporal compromise but also displays explicit commitments to his apparent dualism; and (far more than Hulme) they were enabled to promote this dualistic temporality largely because of the way it confirmed a public romanticism, even against the public’s own better cultural and political interests. Proust is perhaps the best example here, because his Bergsonism matches that of Hulme in key ways, and because we get in his work a much more influential version of the subtle but really critical dynamic at work in Hulme’s ultimate refusal to compromise. Like Hulme, Proust was initially indebted to Bergson – for his sense of the way real time gets lost in the temporal abstractions of practical life. Like Hulme, Proust renounced Bergson, and did so in response to something actually inessential to Bergson’s theories. For Proust, the inessential yet decisive thing was Bergson’s implication that lost time could be regained voluntarily, that some effort could get one ‘back into real duration’. Proust, of course, believed that memory could regain time only through involuntary impressions, which circumvent the intellect designed to keep time at a distance.10 Bergson actually thought so too – he never says that we can make successful active efforts to recapture duration once spatialized time has intervened – but Proust had to dissociate himself from the popularized Bergson, who had come to stand (in the public imagination) for a fairly simplistic way of recovering temporal authenticity. Proust was unlike Hulme in that he departed from Bergson into more extreme romanticism (that of involuntary impressions) but nevertheless the dynamic is the same: both wanted something more agonistic out of Bergson, and both got it, at the cost of truly accurate Bergsonism, and at the cost of a certain complexity in their own work. In Proust’s case, this loss is not actual: Proust does in fact achieve (and even surpass) the more complex temporal reciprocity Bergson actually theorizes, and it is only in the simplified account of the Proustian vocation that compromise devolves into dualism. In Proust, private and public time do interpenetrate, for Marcel needs the time spent and lost in the salon and in jealous obsession to put a necessary distance between past and present impressions. But such interpenetration is most often missed or lost because of the way a kind of pseudo-Bergsonian dualism – perpetuated by the critical tradition, in which Proust, Hulme, and others played their part – inevitably steals attention from less dramatic but more valuable compromises with which Proust, Hulme, and others really worked. What we lose, as a result, is a vital kind of temporal proficiency, a capability absolutely critical to life within modernity. It is what Proust discovers when he finds a way to make time’s passing – the threat of dissolution so notoriously more active in the modern moment – itself the key to temporal transcendence. It is this power to integrate temporalities despite or even through the complexities of temporal modernity. Its result is what Hulme’s compromise might have achieved, in art and politics and beyond. And as for Hulme it is a power abdicated in temporal dualism, and if we continue to prefer and to sentimentalize subjective temporal rupture, we do so at greater risk, now, as the need for active temporal

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integration grows. The historical conditions that made Bergson, Hulme, Proust, and others aware of discrepancies among human temporalities have given way now to conditions ever more conducive to temporal diversity. What Greenwich Mean Time, the routinization of work, and relativity did to the modernist moment is now performed ever more actively in the world-time of globality, which joins unprecedented differentiation with unprecedented proximity and thereby puts time itself vastly out of joint.11 Temporal experiment seen to inspire subjective freedom, or to explore it at the expense of shaping public temporal interventions, does little to provide readers with the equipment they actually need to manage the temporality of modernity. By contrast, reciprocity – and the balance Bergson describes when he describes the ‘well-balanced mind’, ‘nicely adapted to life’ by its position ‘between . . . two extremes’ – gives human consciousness the chance to engage flexibly with modernity’s new temporal schemes, and to formulate structures (of personal time and also of history) to manage them (1991, p. 153). Especially as our time schemes become ever more diverse and heterogeneous, such powers of engagement are critical, and it is ever more critical that thinkers with access to means of theoretical reconciliation cease to let sentimental dualities divide our times against us.

Notes 1

See, for example, the critical response to Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind, 1998 and Daniel Dennett’s work on the narrative nature of consciousness, which criticizes the application of cognitive theory to narrative for the way it would delimit narrative creativity to ‘mere’ linearity. For a general discussion of resistance to the link between cognitive science and aesthetic theory, see David Herman, Narrative Theory. 2 The best treatments of modernist time see it in less black-and-white terms. See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 1966; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1984-88; and Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time, 2000. These accounts acknowledge the complexity of modernist time, but even among them critics rarely note the effort among the modernists to close the new ‘aporia’ (Ricoeur’s term) created by modernity’s temporal diversity. 3 See Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson, 1993 for the best account of the ‘cult of Bergson’ of the early twentieth century. Cultish regard for Bergson persists even beyond Bergson’s loss of popularity into, for example, Deleuze’s appreciation of him (see Douglass, 1992). 4 For accounts of Hulme’s debt to and renunciation of Bergson, see Csengeri’s ‘Introduction’ to Collected Writings; Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism, 1984; Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism, 1985; Jesse Matz, ‘T. E. Hulme’, 2004. 5 Antliff, 1991, pp. 14-15. See also Robert C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900-1914, which focuses on Action Française’s attack on Bergson’s romanticism, and Hewitt (1993) for a relevant explanation of fascism’s appropriation of aesthetic vitalism more generally. 6 See below for Proust’s explanation of his disagreement with Bergson (and its relevance to Hulme’s case). 7 This conflation of different disciplinary meanings of ‘freedom’ occurs mainly in Time and Free Will (1889), and it is the stress on liberation in that book that perhaps creates the erroneous associations in the later one, but even in Creative Evolution Bergson will extend

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physiological, psychological, and evolutionary discussions of the relations between freedom and necessity into romantic valorizations of human liberty: writing about these relations and the way they condition ‘intuition’, for example, he writes: ‘On our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of nature, on our origin and perhaps also on our destiny, it throws a light feeble and vacillating, but which none the less pierces the darkness of the night in which the intellect leaves us’ (Bergson, 1998, p. 268). 8 For a similar account of the implications of the memory-image, see Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1989, where Bergson’s theory becomes a way to theorize the innovative temporality of cinema. 9 There is ample evidence that this political version of the compromise was available to Hulme and perhaps even too familiar: it is at work, perhaps, in Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, where Sorel applies Bergsonian ‘intuition’ to his explanation of the myth of the general strike. The complications of Socialism and its mass of sentiments are resolved and simplified in Syndicalism, as Sorel describes it, by the integral knowledge intuition entails. Here, the historical stage represented by the general strike is one with the ‘movement’ that makes time an ‘undivided whole’, and even if Sorel too did not have time fully to work out the application of Bergson’s ideas to political theory, he points the way that Hulme also might have taken (Sorel, 1950, p. 140). 10 In Le Temps of 12 November 1913, Proust ‘pre-emptively denied any debt to Bergson’, writing, ‘mon oeuvre est dominée par la distinction entre la mémoire involuntaire et la mémoire volontaire, distinction qui non seulement ne figure pas dans la philosophie de M. Bergson, mais est même contredite par elle’ (Pilkington, 1976, p. 146). 11 Here I gesture at developments that this conclusion cannot fully explore – developments I can evoke by citing two theorists for whom they have lately been a great concern: Appadurai, who in Modernity at Large (1996) hopes that modernity’s temporal discontinuities might be an opportunity for new imaginative capacities among the dispossessed, and Lyotard, who in The Inhuman (1988) fears that ‘time today’ disallows the temporal diversity vital to political resistance.

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Chapter 7

Hulme Among the Progressives Lee Garver

The name T. E. Hulme conjures up a variety of violent, belligerent, and misogynistic images. One thinks immediately of his ostentatious carrying of a set of knuckledusters carved by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, his suggestion that ‘personal violence’ would be the best way to deal with rival art critic Anthony Ludovici, and his repeated admonition to a talkative lady friend, always emphasized by a tap of his knuckle-duster on her arm, ‘Forget you’re a personality!’ (Hynes, 1962, p. x). Among Hulme’s early writings, no work is probably more troubling in this respect than his 1911 essay ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’. In this autobiographical piece, Hulme depicts himself as an almost archetypal reactionary, someone of authoritarian inclinations who is dismissive of progress, democratic consensus, and the entrance of women into the public sphere. The essay begins with Hulme mocking congresses, especially reformers and wealthy American women who believe that by bringing together all the brightest philosophical minds in one location some previously undisclosed truth will finally be discovered. Denying that philosophy can lead to a shared, reasoned understanding of the world, Hulme asserts, ‘Metaphysics for me is not a science but an art – the art of completely expressing certain attitudes which one may take up towards the cosmos. What attitude you do take up is not decided for you by metaphysics itself, but by other things’ (CW, p. 106). The piece then moves to Bologna, the site of a 1911 international philosophy congress, where Hulme describes his delight at discovering a military procession in honor of the Duke of Abruzzi complete with shouting crowds, bands, great red banners, and ‘officers in wonderful sweeping blue capes’ (CW, p. 108). Torn between following this procession and attending the opening of the philosophical congress, Hulme ultimately attends the congress, but not without a sense of pained regret. ‘Inside’, he tells us, ‘I knew from the programme that Professor Enriques would speak of Reality. But alas! Reality for me is so old a lady that no information about her, however new, however surprising, could attain the plane of interest legitimately described by the word gossip’ (CW, p. 198). Furthermore, attendees at the congress would invariably speak of progress and the ‘harmony of the concert of the cosmos’, whereas the only progress Hulme claims that he can stand is ‘the progress of princes and troops, for they, though they move, make no pretence of moving “upward”’ (CW, p. 108). Worst of all is the sight that greets Hulme when he first enters the lecture hall – ‘a regular garden of extraordinary hats’ and ‘great numbers of pretty women’

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(CW, p. 109). It is here, where he dramatically concludes his piece, that Hulme fully realizes that by attending the congress he has abandoned the virile world of military parades and troop movements for a feminized realm of intellectual discussion (CW, pp. 108-9). The picture of Hulme that emerges from this essay is a familiar one, and it confirms many of the worst stereotypes about this important early modernist. His contempt for progressive opinion, his enthusiasm for princely and military processions, and his resentment of women’s intrusion into the domain of philosophy suggest that he was from the outset of his writing career an unapologetic reactionary. Even his self-identification as a pluralist – someone who, in contrast to most intellectuals of his time, believed that there was no single truth or good – leads him not to be suspicious of those in power, but instead to praise soldiers and those who would send them off to war. ‘I am a pluralist, and to see soldiers for a pluralist should be a symbolic philosophical drama. There is no Unity, no Truth, but forces which have different aims, and whose whole reality consists in those differences’ (CW, p. 108). Since T. S. Eliot’s 1924 review of Speculations, the posthumously assembled collection of prose that established Hulme’s reputation, modernist scholars have done little to complicate this reactionary self-portrait. Even those critics who have been aware of his longtime affiliation with the English socialist magazine the New Age position Hulme unambiguously on the political Right, aligning him with a small but influential strain of anti-Liberal conservatism in this weekly publication.1 While I do not wish to downplay or excuse Hulme’s less attractive qualities, I do want to suggest that the picture of him that we have inherited is in many ways incomplete, especially as it concerns his early Bergsonian phase. Although Hulme was from the beginning enamored of violence and skeptical of congresses, he was not always as hostile to socialism and the Left as has been assumed. Nor was he as unambiguously misogynist and militarist as his self-portrait in ‘Notes from the Bologna Congress’ might suggest. When his earliest published writings – specifically his New Age essays of 1909 – are examined in their original sociopolitical context, a more populist and labor-friendly portrait of the man emerges, one that confounds conventional ideological categorization. Though it might seem improbable that Hulme could ever find common cause with socialists and progressives, the New Age reveals that late Edwardian English politics facilitated surprising rhetorical collusions and alliances. Hulme was particularly intrigued by the possibilities of aligning himself with and addressing a large, radicalized working-class readership. In his 1909 essays, he employed rhetoric similar to that of a now forgotten socialist agitator named Victor Grayson, whose brief tenure as co-editor of the New Age had given the publication a huge boost in readership and a powerful influence among rank-and-file laborers. In addition, Hulme showed a remarkable readiness to employ language and imagery associated with radical feminists and opponents of British military authority, who were understood by many in the magazine to be natural allies of Grayson in his fight against Liberal parliamentary corruption.

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Hulme’s early essays, in particular those written for the New Age between July and December 1909, make up a distinct body of work. As a number of critics have noted, they are heavily influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson and differ significantly from Hulme’s later classicist and anti-humanist writings.2 Instead of emphasizing the importance of tradition and objectivity, these essays ground authority in intuition and individual perception. They also offer an important critique of language that proved influential in the development of Imagist poetics and remain to this day an important point of reference in theoretical discussions of Anglo-American modernism. The main targets of criticism in these essays are intellectualism, conceptual logic, and prose. Drawing on Bergson, Hulme argues that reality is ‘alogical’ (CW, p. 90), a ‘flux of immediate experience’ (CW, p. 86) that resists being translated into any kind of intellectual or conceptual order. ‘I always figure’, comments Hulme, ‘the main Bergsonian position in this way: conceiving the constructs of logic as geometrical wire models and the flux of reality as a turbulent river such that it is impossible with any combination of these wire models, however elaborate, to make a model of the moving stream’ (CW, p. 86). Much of this criticism was directed at traditional Hegelian metaphysics, especially its tendency to assume that reality could be resolved into logical concepts. But the most interesting critique focused on the limitations of ordinary language. Drawing a sharp distinction between ‘visual’ and ‘counter’ languages, poetry and prose, Hulme argued for the greater truthfulness of poetry: In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs and counters, which are moved about according to rules, without being visualised at all in the process. There are in prose certain type situations and arrangements of words, which move as automatically into certain other arrangements as do functions in algebra. One only changes the x’s and y’s back into physical things at the end of the process. Poetry, in one aspect at any rate, may be considered as an effort to avoid this characteristic of prose. It is not a counter language, but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you from gliding through an abstract process. (CW, p. 95)

For Hulme, poetry was superior to prose because it was more physical, more concretely based in individual experience. Although poetry was always only a ‘compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily’, its ‘fresh epithets and fresh metaphors’, especially when rooted in the faculty of sight, came closer in his opinion than prose to conveying the turbulent, prelinguistic texture of human experience. Such language also provided, he believed, an important guarantee of human freedom. By recovering ‘an alogical element [in reality] which cannot be reduced to law’, it reminded readers that life was defined more by change and chance than order or systematization (CW, p. 90). All this is well established. But Hulme’s ideological intentions in espousing such views at this specific moment are less well understood. Currently, the most persuasive interpretation is provided by Michael Levenson. He identifies Hulme’s

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skeptical interrogations of traditional metaphysics and prose with an antidemocratic strain of individualism that achieved its most radical formulation in Dora Marsden’s little magazines the New Freewoman (1913) and the Egoist (191419). Besides publishing the work of a number of important early modernists, including Imagists Ezra Pound, H.D., and Richard Aldington, Marsden was a tireless champion of Max Stirner, a nineteenth-century German thinker who rejected all intellectual systems and asserted the primacy of the individual ego. Like him, she believed that individual subjectivity alone was real, and she considered abstractions such as ‘humanity’, ‘divinity’, and ‘law’ chimerical, lifedenying constructs that enslaved those who believed in them. Marsden also shared Stirner’s disdain for progressive and humanitarian politics, arguing that selfishness was the only principle which was life-affirming. Although Levenson never claims that Hulme’s early writings were specifically Stirnerian, he astutely notes that both Hulme and Marsden privileged individual perception and liberty, disdained abstraction, and played key roles in the formulation and promotion of Imagism. In his view, Marsden simply gave extreme expression to a propensity already present in Hulme – a desire to retreat from those forces of modernity that threatened to undermine writers’ traditionally privileged place in the social hierarchy. ‘In the face of working-class militancy, religious and philosophical scepticism, scientific technology and the popular press’, Levenson comments, ‘there was a tendency – especially among artists and intellectuals – to withdraw into individual subjectivity. . . . [W]here liberal ideology had made the individual the basis on which to construct religion, politics, ethics, and aesthetics, egoism abjured the constructive impulse and was content to remain where it began: in the skeptical self’ (1984, p. 68). Levenson’s interpretation is in many ways quite valuable. By identifying several striking affinities between Hulme and Marsden, he is able to trace a developmental teleology in early modernism that superseded any single individual. In addition, by extending his analysis to include Ezra Pound and other Imagists, he is further able to grant an ideological coherence to Imagism that might not otherwise be perceptible. Unfortunately, taken in isolation, Levenson’s analysis presents a rather distorted picture of Hulme, especially insofar as it suggests that he from the outset disdained progressive politics and felt threatened by working-class militancy and the popular press. While it might seem logical to assume as much, given Hulme’s later ideological interests, it is important to remember that Hulme never published in the New Freewoman or the Egoist. Nor did he ever show even a passing interest in Stirner or egoism. By the time Marsden even began publishing the New Freewoman in 1913, Hulme had generally abandoned interest in Bergson and poetry and shifted his attention elsewhere. Hulme’s early essays took shape in a very different cultural environment. Besides predating the Marsden-led Stirner revival by almost three years, these writings appeared in the New Age, a socialist weekly with a much larger circulation and more progressive editorial outlook. Whereas Marsden’s little magazines sometimes had subscription bases of as little as 300 individuals, the New Age maintained a circulation of at least 3,000-4,000 from its inception in 1907 to the outbreak of war in 1914.3 Furthermore, when

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Hulme first appeared in the magazine in 1909, the New Age was unapologetically progressive, placing its faith in the constructive possibilities of revolutionary socialism. Although it gave space to alternative viewpoints and was often scathingly critical of numerous aspects of the labor movement, including among its contributors a number of vocal critics of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, the New Age’s editorial voice remained committedly socialist. Of greatest significance to Hulme in these respects was a series of dramatic developments that took place in the magazine between October 1908 and April 1909. From its inception, the New Age courted notoriety and publicity. During its first year of publication, the magazine’s editor, A. R. Orage, had tirelessly fostered and even at times stage-managed a lively public debate between Edwardian literary titans George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, thereby winning the publication scores of new readers and a reputation for excitement. But starting with the 10 October 1908 edition of the New Age, when Orage announced that recently elected Minister of Parliament Victor Grayson would shortly become co-editor, the magazine ventured into far bolder promotional territory. Grayson is now little remembered, but for a brief period in 1908, this uncompromising socialist was a national cause célèbre. He first made a name for himself by winning a by-election in the face of not just Tory opposition, but also that of the Labour Party, quickly becoming a rallying point for those disaffected socialists who believed that the Labour Party leadership was insufficiently radical and too much under the influence of the governing Liberal Party. But his real claim to fame rested with his subsequent violent disruption of Parliament, an act clearly planned in advance and timed to give his arrival at the New Age maximum public exposure. In the same issue of the New Age in which it was announced that Grayson would become co-editor, there appeared an article by regular contributor Edwin Pugh titled ‘Wanted: A Martyr or Two’. Pugh decried the unwillingness of the Labour Party or Parliament to address the problem of unemployment and claimed that ‘it would be better for the genuine unemployed person if he were responsible for a few disturbances now and then’, even going so far as to assert that any such person should ‘be prepared to meet violence with violence’. He then concluded his article by quoting the following statement by Grayson: ‘I say with all the calm of which I am capable, if a hungry multitude wants food and the trained forces prevent them from getting it, I wish the unemployed every success if they come into collision with the authorities’ (Pugh, 1908, p. 470). Grayson lost no time in making good on these incendiary statements. In the very next issue, the last before the reopening of Parliament, he contributed an angry piece titled ‘The Coming Session’, where he attacked the proposed legislative program of the special autumn session of Parliament in which he would make his debut. ‘For many days’, he commented, ‘a minimum of members will sit, bored to death through the weary hours, laboriously beating out obscure details of [a brewery] Licensing Bill . . . . Meanwhile the country writhes and groans under its terrible incubus of poverty and unemployment . . . . Can anyone imagine a body of men less capable of apprehending the awful significance of these figures than the British House of Commons?’ (Grayson, 1908a, p. 483). Then, before the next

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issue of the New Age arrived on newsstands, he staged his protest, forcibly disturbing this special session of Parliament. Interrupting debate to protest the unemployment problem, Grayson spoke out of turn, refused to be silenced or to sit down, and after being suspended by voice vote and shouted down by repeated cries of ‘order’, left screaming that the Commons were ‘a House of murderers’.4 Grayson’s timing could not have been better. While he was making his protest, large crowds of suffragettes and unemployed workmen were confronting police outside Parliament, giving added authority to his criticisms.5 Nor could the results have been more spectacular for the New Age. Coinciding with his assumption of editorial duties, Grayson’s suspension brought an entirely new readership and influence to this largely intellectual magazine. In the first issue under his coeditorship, the New Age published more than 60 telegrams, postcards, and letters of support, mostly from rank-and-file laborers pledging encouragement and backing.6 Dozens of additional letters and union resolutions were published in the following issue, providing further evidence, in the words of the magazine, that ‘Mr. Grayson alone among the Parliamentary representatives of Socialism and Labour has expressed the spirit animating the majority of the members of the movement’.7 Three weeks later, as Grayson continued to fan the flames of anger through fiery broadsides in the magazine, the New Age’s circulation had swelled by more than 6,000 to reach an unprecedented 22,000 readers, thereby entering the ranks of mass-circulation weeklies.8 In addition to expanding the magazine’s readership, Grayson made the New Age a key powerbroker in a struggle for control of the Labour Party. When literary historians discuss early twentieth-century Labour politics, they tend to depict the Labour Party as a single, united organization under stable leadership. The truth of the matter, however, was that it was frequently wracked by divisions, and rarely more rancorously than just after Grayson’s protest. Many younger members of the Labour Party were horrified that party leaders countenanced Grayson’s expulsion, and when Grayson refused to appear on the same stage as Labour leader Keir Hardie, long an untouchable icon of the party, the New Age became the rallying ground from which he and like-minded radicals called for new and more vigorous leadership. Besides Orage and Grayson, Labour historian and activist G. R. S. Taylor was probably the most outspoken and articulate voice in this struggle. In a series of columns, he encouraged readers to make Grayson’s fight their own and boldly predicted on the eve of the Labour Party’s Ninth Annual Conference in Portsmouth that this gathering would inaugurate a great battle for control of the party. ‘The business of the delegates’, he commented, ‘will not be to pass more pious resolutions: but to see how they can make their leaders in Parliament do something for the resolutions which were passed last year and the year before. It will be a great fight between the rank-and-file and the leaders who have lost their nerve and skill in appealing for popular support’ (Taylor, 1909a, p. 238). By the time Hulme began writing for the New Age in July 1909, some of this euphoria had subsided. Grayson’s failure to appear at the Portsmouth conference undermined a good deal of his credibility, and on 25 February 1909, five months after joining the New Age, he quietly departed the magazine. But if Hulme’s arrival

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postdated Grayson’s tenure, it nevertheless took place at a time when the New Age remained committed to Grayson’s radical populist policies, and Hulme’s essays were clearly part of a larger effort by the magazine to continue to capitalize on his celebrity. Most critics who attempt to explain why Hulme published almost exclusively in the New Age during his lifetime tend to align his writings with various strains of anti-liberal conservatism in the magazine.9 They note that the New Age harbored a number of reactionary thinkers, most notably Nietzsche translators and defenders of ‘aristocracy’ J. M. Kennedy, Anthony Ludovici, and Oscar Levy, and they suggest that Hulme naturally belongs in their company. But what these critics fail to note about Hulme’s early writings is their deliberately populist sympathies. Although Hulme was in 1909 himself something of a Nietzschean, arguing that the German philosopher preceded Bergson in critiquing conceptualism, he did not share Kennedy’s, Ludovici’s, and Levy’s elitist views or find inspiration in their writing. Indeed, he deeply disliked Ludovici and would later dismiss him as a ‘charlatan’ and ‘light-weight superman’ (CW, p. 260). Hulme instead allied himself rhetorically with working men and found inspiration in popular rebellion. Throughout his 1909 essays for the New Age, Hulme defined philosophical truth in populist terms, deliberately employing diction that echoed Grayson’s own. In explaining why philosophers and artists typically clung to smooth counter words of abstraction in the face of the alogical flux, the turbulent pre-linguistic ground of everything he considered true and real, Hulme suggested they did so out of displaced class fear and anxiety: Reaction from its confusion may take two forms: the practical, which requires a mechanism to enable it to move easily in fixed paths through the flux and change, and the aesthetic which shrinks from any contact with chaos. The practical attitude, by the universals of thought, arranges the flux in some kind of order, as the police might arrange a crowd for the passage of a procession. The next step for the man who admires order is to pass from the practical to the aesthetic, to assert that what puts order into the confused flux of sensation alone is real, the flux itself being mere appearance. The mind that loves fixity can thus find rest. It can satisfy its aesthetic shrinking from the great unwashed flux by denying that it is real. (CW, p. 93)

In this passage, Hulme first compares the individual who uses the universals of thought to arrange the flux into something less threatening to a policeman who imposes order on a potentially unruly crowd. Next, he compares this same individual to an aesthete who shrinks from contact with the ‘great unwashed’ masses, or, as Hulme cleverly phrases it, the ‘great unwashed flux’ (CW, p. 93). Although in neither instance is Hulme making a specifically political declaration, his prose bespeaks larger sympathies. The references to policemen and crowds would have immediately reminded readers of protests against parliamentary injustice by unemployed workmen and suffragettes, who continued to have tense standoffs and confrontations with law enforcement officials. And the reference to the ‘great unwashed flux’ would have both served as a critique of those timid souls who feared the working classes and called to mind Grayson, who took ironic

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pleasure in embracing the idea that he and his followers were, in his words, ‘of a coarse and vulgar grain, with a fundamental objection to aspirates and a congenial prejudice against soap’ (Grayson, 1908b, p. 43). Hulme’s discussion of the image, the central doctrine in his effort to give language greater immediacy and directness, was equally populist. In criticizing traditional philosophers, he accused them of ‘never moving on the physical plane where philosophy arises, but always in the abstract plane where it is finished and polished’, thereby mocking the idea that there was a ‘mysterious high method of thinking by logic superior to the low common one of images’ (CW, p. 96). This clear preference for a low common form of language, as opposed to one more finished and polished, not only would have reflected Hulme’s pride in his rustic background and North Staffordshire accent but also would have signified his identification with the British working masses. Aside from being considered by many in power ‘low’ and ‘common’ in birth and manners, British laborers’ exertions were often unfavorably contrasted with the more refined work of businessmen, intellectuals, and professionals. By reversing this hierarchy, Hulme lent indirect support to Grayson’s followers. He also gave tacit blessing to the New Age’s criticisms of Labour Party officials, who Grayson bitterly argued had betrayed their class roots by becoming more interested in studying ‘Parliamentary form and demeanour’ and mastering the chamber’s ‘exquisite etiquette’ than in representing the everyday interests of their constituents (Grayson, 1908b, p. 43). In addition to being populist, Hulme’s essays valorized Graysonian-style lawbreaking and revolt. One of Hulme’s recurrent criticisms of intellectualism was that it regarded freedom with repugnance. Under its influence, he argued, ‘[c]hance is abolished, everything is reduced to law’ (CW, p. 90), and ‘the whole world [is] made trim and tidy’ (CW, p. 100). In contrast, one of the key grounds on which Hulme praised Bergson, Jules de Gaultier, and other philosophers of flux was that they were opponents of order and celebrants of ‘individual idiosyncrasy’, ‘bold speculation’, and ‘adventure’ (CW, p. 100). Such comments not only offered a philosophical defense of Grayson’s intemperate protests but also echoed those of G. R. S. Taylor, who in criticizing the Labour Party as an organization where ‘timid men hide themselves from all such risky adventures as political revolt’, made it clear that he was ‘speaking on behalf of a journal which [had] no superstitious belief in “order”’ (Taylor, 1909b, p. 296). Indeed, Hulme’s essays affirmed in more strictly philosophical terms the arguments of Grayson himself, who had earlier criticized ‘law and order’ on the grounds that such principles were responsible for ‘hungry and desperate men’ being ‘bludgeoned by the police’ (Grayson, 1908a, p. 43). Hulme’s rhetorical affinities with radical feminists, who were regarded by many in the New Age as natural allies of Grayson, were more mediated but no less striking. They suggest that his dislike of middle-class ‘emancipated women’ (CW, p. 21), expressed as early as 1906 in notebooks posthumously collected under the title ‘Cinders’, did not necessarily extend to suffragettes and other enemies of social peace.10 That Grayson and his supporters might find common cause with the suffragettes would have occasioned little surprise to most Edwardians. Grayson’s

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protest directly mirrored several earlier suffragette demonstrations, in which demonstrators had heckled speakers in Parliament, and would have invited immediate comparison. What is more, because his outburst inside the House of Commons coincided with militant feminist protests outside, his actions would have been easily conflated with their own. Certainly, the New Age did all it could to stress the affinities. Though not all contributors were in favor of giving women the vote or looked kindly on the Women’s Social and Political Union, the organization behind the protests, the magazine as a whole viewed the suffragettes positively and often suggested that organized labor had much to learn from them. ‘Would that we could imbue Socialists with something more of the energy shown by the militant suffragettes’, commented Orage, who approved not only of the W. S. P. U.’s methods but also their deep-seated distrust of Liberal Party promises to address their demands in due time (Orage, 1908b, p. 195): Militant action of the women has abundantly justified the refusal to take Mr. Lloyd George or any of the Ministers at their word. ‘The Great Betrayal’ writes Mr. Keir Hardie. But the women have not been betrayed; they understand far better than the Labour members, who are, however in closest proximity to the members of the Government, the character of the men who now rule our destinies. This is merely another instance of the political perspicacity of women as compared with men. (Orage, 1909b, pp. 353-4)

For Orage and others like him, the suffragettes had blazed the path down which Grayson was trying to lead the Labour Party, a path of direct confrontation with a corrupt and untrustworthy government that paid weak lip service to the needs of labor and women. Hulme’s rhetorical affiliation with radical feminists and suffragettes took three forms. The first was rooted in his insistence that philosophy was a violent subjective pursuit, not a rational intellectual science. ‘[T]hroughout the ages’, asserted Hulme, ‘philosophy, like fighting and painting, has remained a purely personal activity. The only effect the advance of science has on the three activities is to elaborate and refine the weapons that they use. The man who uses a rifle uses it for the same purpose as a man who uses a bludgeon’ (CW, p. 101). While such views might appear to have little to do with feminism, especially insofar as they conjure images of weapon-toting men, they directly echoed comments made by his editor about the suffragettes. In Orage’s opinion, one of the most important influences women had on modern times was that they reminded socialists and other political radicals that all thought was at root subjective. This is particularly evident in a critical dialogue he published shortly before Hulme began writing for his magazine: Then your reasons for advocating Woman’s Suffrage are purely personal? Certainly; what other reasons would you have? At bottom the most impartial opinions are partial, and the most impersonal personal. How feminine!

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By employing the same phrase that Orage uses here – ‘purely personal’ – and more importantly asserting, like his editor, that no thought or reason could be impartial, Hulme implicitly tied his philosophical views to those of Orage and by extension the suffragettes. Furthermore, by suggesting that philosophy was an ‘activity’ tied to violent ends, Hulme made explicit what Orage had only hinted at when he claimed that ‘action, after all, is next to everything’: he insisted on the necessary role of militancy and violence in contemporary politics. The second way in which Hulme affiliated himself rhetorically with radical feminists was by speaking of his philosophical views in politically gendered terms. In the following passage, Hulme describes the emergence of Bergsonian philosophy out of the straightjacket of scientific rationalism in terms that playfully parallel the rise of modern feminism: ‘Philosophy, tempted by science, fell and became respectable. It sold its freedom for a quite imaginary power of giving sure results. . . . But with this modern [Bergsonian] movement, philosophy has at last shaken itself free from the philosophical sciences and established its right to an independent existence. . . . She has once more escaped the spirit that would make her a dull citizenness [sic]. Once more, without the expedient of turning herself into myrtle, Daphne has escaped the god’s embraces, which promising love would but result in ungraceful fertility’ (CW, pp. 100-1). Provided we recognize that philosophy is cast in a female role, something that is not entirely obvious until the personal pronoun ‘she’ is employed later in the passage, it becomes evident that Hulme is equating modern philosophy with a woman who has cast aside the heavy hand of convention and seized independence. At first, philosophy enjoyed freedom, much as a young unmarried woman might without the burden of a husband. However, philosophy then was ‘tempted by science’ and ‘fell’ – succumbing to this discipline’s embraces and promises of love – and finally she ‘became respectable’, settling into a tedious and restrictive marriage with this paternalistic partner. Only with the arrival of Bergson, de Gaultier, and other modern philosophers, Hulme suggests, has philosophy – still understood to be a woman but now identified with Daphne, a Greek river god’s daughter – escaped science’s hold and established her ‘right to an independent existence’ (CW, p. 101). Like the suffragettes, she refuses any longer to be a ‘dull citizenness’ who finds fulfillment in childbirth or ‘ungraceful fertility’, the scientific equivalent of ‘giving sure results’, and spurns the advances and blandishments of those who would remove her from her natural element: the disorderly, river-like flux of reality. The final way in which Hulme affiliated himself with radical feminists was through his praise of ‘intuition’, a word traditionally associated with women and a

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concept which he identified with feminism. This identification is most obvious in ‘Bax’, his July 1909 essay-review of E. Belfort Bax’s The Roots of Reality (1907), a now-forgotten work of philosophy that proposed, much as Hulme did, that reality was at root alogical and resistant to conceptualization. E. Belfort Bax was an executive in the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and a former associate of William Morris. He was also a regular contributor to the New Age and the magazine’s resident anti-feminist, often single-handedly upholding this unpopular position against a range of hostile critics.11 In reviewing Bax’s work, Hulme knew that readers would be aware of his opposition to women’s enfranchisement, and he had great fun in tracing the flaws of Bax’s philosophy to its anti-feminism, most notably its resistance to intuition. In his review, Hulme praised Bax for exposing the flaws of intellectualism and asserting the ultimate reality of the alogical. However, he could not help but feel that Bax ultimately lacked the courage of his philosophical convictions. In a dig that was surely intended to shame this militant Marxist, he accused him of becoming ‘alarmed at his own audacity’ and seeking to make his philosophy ‘perfectly respectable by giving it as a companion a curious mixture of all the German idealists’ (CW, p. 89). The sticking point, in Hulme’s view, was intuition, something that became evident when Bax was compared to Bergson. Whereas Bergson believed it was possible through intuition to overcome the limitations of the intellect and identify oneself with the flux, Bax nervously balked at such a possibility and retreated back into a muddled mix of Kantian idealism and modern nominalism. For Hulme, this failure of will was principally a result of Bax’s fear and dislike of women: By many toilsome ways Bax, like Moses, leads us to the Promised Land; then, having privately surveyed it, informs us that, after all, it isn’t really interesting, tells us to go back again, but always to bear in mind that there is such a place . . . What did he see in the promised land of the alogical which prevented him from wandering there? We can only surmise maliciously that somewhere in its pleasant valleys he saw a woman. Is not intuition too dangerous a process for an anti-feminist to suggest as the ultimate philosophical process? (CW, pp. 91-2)

Although Hulme would later distance himself from Bergsonian thought for much the same reason he suggests Bax did – the philosophy’s overly close association with women – Hulme’s essay clearly demonstrates that in 1909 he was not only quite happy to acknowledge this association but also eager to exploit it for debating purposes.12 Perhaps more importantly, it establishes that Hulme equated the freedoms and dangers of the Bergsonian flux not just with the great unwashed masses, but also with those feminists who possessed the ‘audacity’ and contempt for the ‘respectable’ that Bax so clearly lacked. The same concerns that led Hulme to employ language and imagery associated with radical workers and feminists in his 1909 essays also encouraged him to ally himself with opponents of British military authority in the New Age, another group thought to be a natural ally of Grayson in his battle against Liberal parliamentary

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malfeasance. The crucial article in this instance is ‘Haldane’, Hulme’s August 1909 essay-review of Richard Burdon Haldane’s The Pathway to Reality (1903-4), a philosophical work that incorrectly sought, in Hulme’s words, to prove that ‘Reality is a system; further, that it is an intellectual system, and the flux only has reality in so far as it fits into this system’ (CW, p. 93). The most important thing to note about this essay, something that has gone uncommented upon since its republication in Further Speculations in 1955, is that Haldane was best known in 1909 not as a philosopher but as War Secretary for the governing Liberal Party. His political speeches and policies, especially those concerned with army reform, were deeply unpopular in the New Age and garnered vastly more attention than his philosophy. In choosing to critique a five-year-old set of philosophical writings by this Liberal cabinet member, Hulme was commenting at least as much about Haldane’s politics as his metaphysics. The most important reasons for Haldane’s unpopularity in the New Age were the perceived class biases of his reforms, his indifference to the plight of the working man, and his weakening of the British military. Among Haldane’s most significant innovations were his restructuring of Britain’s various volunteer and non-regular forces into a single Territorial Army and his effort to effect this reorganization along business and professional lines. However, while the idea of creating a true citizen army appealed strongly to many socialists, who had long regarded the military as an outdated refuge for class privilege, most contributors to the New Age considered his reforms undemocratic. Orage claimed that Haldane’s reservation of commissions to public-school trained men was ‘a gross piece of “class” legislation’ (‘Magazines of the Month’, 1908, p. 137), and T. Miller Maguire, a former member of the army, published a long series of articles titled ‘Our Army Organisation: A Contemptible Anachronism’ in which he accused ‘Haldaneism’ of being nothing less than ‘the cult of Snobbery and incapacity’ (Maguire, 1908b, p. 219). ‘The War Office’, he exclaimed, ‘is largely an adjunct of fashionable Society, and is often influenced by ignorant and self-seeking snobs’ (Maguire, 1908a, p. 208). Just as galling to contributors was Haldane’s indifference to the economic havoc his reforms imposed on working men. An anonymous reviewer of Haldane’s Army Reform and Other Addresses (1907) found it horrifying that he defined his most important goal as ‘keeping down the cost of the army’, and many tracked with disgust his steady dismissal of laborers from the Woolwich Arsenal.13 Orage charged the Liberal government under his guidance of ‘treating its workmen like the worst type of employer’ (Orage, 1908b p. 193) and suggested that the Woolwich men had been ‘remorselessly driven out onto the street to swell the ranks of the unemployed’ for the sake of a mere ‘paper economy’ (Orage, 1908a, p. 3). This last criticism in turn fueled doubts as to whether his reforms had even done anything to strengthen the British military. Maguire was of the opinion that Haldane was all fancy talk and bitterly rejected the idea, tirelessly promoted by the War Secretary in speeches, that he and his office had imposed renewed order and organization on the military. What, Maguire asked his readers, did Haldane actually mean by ‘reorganisation’ when he went on platforms and ‘puff[ed] clouds of philosophical obscurantist twaddle all over the

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land’? ‘Absolutely nothing beyond calling things by different names’, Maguire declared (1908c, p. 267). ‘He has been spending about £29,000,000 a year on a mere metaphysical army – “a thing of shreds and patches” – which could not influence international policy in the least if serious war broke out in any part of the world tomorrow’ (Maguire, 1908a, p. 209). Haldane’s purported snobbery and disregard for the common man made him an obvious enemy of Grayson and his supporters, and Hulme criticized his philosophical thought on many of the same grounds. It was Haldane who occasioned Hulme to deny that there was ‘a mysterious high method of thinking by logic superior to the low common one of images’ (CW, p. 96). It was also Haldane who inspired Hulme to mock the mind that would ‘satisfy its aesthetic shrinking from the great unwashed flux by denying that it is real’ (CW, p. 93). But it was Haldane’s treatment of the masses as so many chits in a paper economy and Maguire’s accusations of name-changing sleight of hand that inspired Hulme’s most pointed criticisms. Among Hulme’s dismissive comments about the War Secretary was that he was a counter-word philosopher rather than a visual one: He has the monotonous versatility of the soldier, who in many lands employs the same weapon. It is the very prose of philosophy. He moves his counters, and certainly gets them into new and interesting positions. All the time, however, we cannot believe in their validity, as we are conscious that he is treating as fixed entities things which are not so – which run into one another in inextricable blurs, and are not separate and distinct. He treats the world as if it were a mosaic, whereas in reality all the colours run into one another. For the purposes of communication we must label the places where one colour predominates, by that colour, but then it is an illegitimate manoeuvre to take these names and juggle with them, as if they were distinct and separate realities. (CW, p. 97)

In criticizing Haldane for mistaking words for real, fixed entities that might be moved about in new combinations like colored counters on a board, Hulme affirmed Orage’s claim that the Liberal cabinet member failed to appreciate the difference between a money economy and one made up of living, breathing individuals. Furthermore, by emphasizing that it was illegitimate to take names and juggle with them as if they were distinct realities, he gave sanction to Maguire’s assertions that Haldane’s army reorganization was just so much ‘dialectical hoodwinking’ (1908a, p. 208). One final way in which Hulme allied himself rhetorically with opponents of British military authority in his 1909 New Age essays was by identifying the flux with ‘uncivilized’ victims of British imperialism. Again the key essay is ‘Haldane’. In addition to being responsible for the creation of a Territorial Army, Haldane was an outspoken Liberal Imperialist and the guiding hand behind the restructuring of the Regular Army into an expeditionary force ready to be sent abroad at a moment’s notice. In several places in his essay, Hulme takes subtle jabs at Haldane’s role in establishing British rule and order around the globe. One of the most important is when he imagines Haldane’s efforts to rid philosophy of ‘the unfortunate particular, the alogical’, or, as Hulme describes it, ‘the untameable

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tiger’ of reality. ‘How is it to be murdered’, Hulme has Haldane ask, ‘that we may at last get a civilised and logical system into the cosmos?’ (CW, p. 94). By identifying the alogical or flux with a fierce natural predator relentlessly hunted down by the British in Africa and India, Hulme identified his philosophy with those forces that stood to lose most as a consequence of Haldane’s pacification efforts overseas. This is further emphasized by another key passage later in his essay. Conceding that ‘dialectic’ was sometimes necessary so that a philosopher might ‘develop the primary intuition, and to put it into concepts for purposes of communication’, Hulme nevertheless insisted that ‘metaphysics could exist without it, and if I may be allowed to express a personal opinion, I think what we require now is a race of naked philosophers, free from the inherited embellishments of logic’ (CW, p. 97). Taken together with his comment that ‘as in social life, it is dangerous to get too far away from barbarism’, Hulme was clearly associating himself as a philosopher with those half-clothed, uncivilized ‘savages’ across the globe who had no interest in seeing the world forcibly shaped into a place of system and logical order (CW, pp. 97-8). As should now be evident, Hulme’s earliest published essays were far more popularly conceived and politically progressive than critics have assumed. Far from being the obscure elitist compositions of a radical individualist, as were Dora Marsden’s essays for the Egoist, or the self-consciously reactionary musings of a proto-fascist, as Hulme’s ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’ might lead us to believe, these seminal modernist texts were products of popular socialist journalism. Despite their difficult subject matter, they employed language and imagery associated with Edwardian working-class and feminist militancy, and were clearly trying to piggyback on the celebrity of Victor Grayson and the suffragettes. Not only does this require us to revise the commonly accepted notion that Hulme was from the beginning of his career irremediably reactionary, misogynist, and anti-democratic, but it also obliges us to reexamine his later work. Hulme’s interest in Georges Sorel, for example, has often been explained in terms of his enthusiasm for the right-wing Action Française, which had established a loose alliance with this idiosyncratic defender of working-class violence. However, it might reasonably be asked if Hulme’s interest in Sorel was not at least as much a result of his early identification with Grayson. Similarly, Hulme’s venomous attacks on Bertrand Russell in ‘War Notes’ have often been explained in terms of his reactionary militarist sympathies. Yet it might reasonably be asked if this dislike was instead populist in inspiration. Indeed, I would argue that Hulme’s early sympathy with the political and promotional aims of the New Age colors all his later work and speaks to the ambiguous allegiances of modernism more generally, whose aesthetic principles were able to encompass seemingly contradictory positions – the political Left and Right, misogyny and feminism, pro and anti-militarism – and are not easily compartmentalized in any of these camps.

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Notes 1

See, in particular, Miriam Hansen, 1980, pp. 355-85. See Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism, 1984. 3 See Mark Morrisson, 2000, p. 91 and Wallace Martin, 1967, p. 10. 4 For a full account of what transpired, see the London Times report of the demonstration reprinted in the New Age the following week. ‘Anno Domini I’, New Age 3 (16 October 1908), p. 504. 5 ‘The combined demonstrations of Suffragettes and Unemployed outside the House of Commons on Tuesday was [sic] a much bigger affair than even its promoters expected. The crowd not only far exceeded all the previous records in numbers, but its temper was quite different from that of the usual light-hearted affair. It was markedly an ugly crowd, ready for anything, and it needed but a spark to have set it alight. Had the spark been forthcoming, there would almost certainly have been a serious riot and more bloodshed than has occurred in London in the memory of the present generation.’ See A. R. Orage, ‘Notes of the Week’, New Age 3 (24 October 1908), p. 503. 6 See ‘Mr. Grayson’s Protest’, New Age 4 (29 October 1908), pp. 4-5. 7 See ‘In Support of Grayson’, New Age 4 (5 November 1908), p. 24. 8 ‘To our Readers’, New Age 4 (26 November 1908), p. 81. 9 See Miriam Hansen, 1980, pp. 355-85; Alan Robinson, 1985, pp. 90-118; Louise Blakeney Williams, 2002, pp. 74-90; and Charles Ferrall, 2001, pp. 13-20. 10 Most ‘emancipated women’ were, in Hulme’s view, bloodless and insipidly emotional. ‘[E]mancipated women . . . remind me of disembodied spirits, having no body to rest in. . . . They feel all the emotions of jealousy and desire, but these leading to no action remain as nothing but petty motives. Passion is action and without action but a child’s anger’ (CW, p. 21). 11 See, for example, E. Belfort Bax, ‘Mr. Belfort Bax Replies to his Feminist Critics’, New Age 3 (8 August 1908), pp. 287-8. 12 See his 1911 essay ‘Bergson Lecturing’, in which he reacts with horror at discovering that the audience at a Bergson lecture is made up almost entirely of women, ‘most of them with their heads lifted up in the kind of “Eager Heart” attitude, which resembles nothing so much as the attitude of my kitten when gently waking up from sleep’ (CW, p. 154). 13 ‘Reviews’, New Age 1 (8 August 1907), p. 234. 2

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Chapter 8

Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?: Politics, Machine Aesthetics, and Religion Andrzej Gasiorek

The starting points of liberal theorizing are never neutral between conceptions of the human good; they are always liberal starting points . . . liberal theory is best understood, not at all as an attempt to find a rationality independent of tradition, but as itself an articulation of an historically developed and developing set of social institutions and forms of activity, that is, as the voice of a tradition. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 145 The use of mechanical lines in the new art is in no sense merely a reflection of mechanical environment. It is a result of a change of sensibility which is, I think, the result of a change of attitude which will become increasingly obvious. T. E. Hulme, Collected Writings, p. 284

Contingency and Disenchantment A familiar account of the disenchantment of the world inaugurated by modernity emphasizes the overcoming of tradition, largely as a result of the impact of science, the rationalization of the social sphere, economic globalization, the spread of secularism, the dissolution of shared norms brought about by the pluralization of cultures, and the insinuation of a critical, sceptical attitude following on from postEnlightenment philosophies. The transition from a form of life rooted in a long established habitus to one that projected itself towards an as yet unrealized but radically different future was at the heart of modernity. The flip-side of this transformative dream was its recognition of the world’s radical contingency, which threatened the nihilism that Nietzsche so brilliantly diagnosed and that he sought to overcome through an affirmative philosophy of the self-creating individual who would embrace a life without metaphysical props, positing ends out of himself. The possibility of re-imagining and re-making life vied with existential dread; severed from external sources of value, modernity had to ‘to create its normativity out of itself’ (Habermas, 1987, p. 7). For Zygmunt Bauman, modernity is then predicated on the desire to extirpate contingency by subordinating it to human

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necessity, but the inevitable failure of this imperative means that it is haunted by the ambivalence that became its hallmark (1991, p. 7). Responses to this ambivalence have varied widely. On one hand, blueprints for a designed future, austere geometric architectural forms, and dreams of social engineering disclose a rage to order; on the other hand, attempts to capture human apprehension of temporality, the subjective nature of experience, and the multiple perspectives through which life is conceived betoken a willingness to accept, perhaps even to celebrate, haphazardness and uncertainty. One trajectory within literary modernism drew especially on the rhetorics of classicism in order to resist the nihilism discerned in the subjective turn. Bergson’s claim in Creative Evolution that ‘the universe is best understood on the model of the development and elaboration of consciousness’ threatened to reduce the world to the individual’s perception of it and to dissolve any sense of independent selfhood in the durée réelle (Burwick and Douglass, 1992, p. 4). With their calls to order, invocations of tradition and discipline, insistence on the fixed and limited nature of human beings, and support for stable social systems, a group of loosely linked writers such as T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound sought to articulate a conception of the aesthetic that could offer a viable alternative to this immersion in the temporal flux. The emphasis fell on art-works that were committed to public values, the stabilization of reality in solid forms, and a strong sense of space. Hulme, of course, went through a Bergsonian phase, and his writing on art and politics after he disassociated himself from Bergson is marked by the latter’s influence, if only in the sense that it defines the parameters of the view Hulme is now reacting against. In ‘Cinders’ (1906-7), for example, his flux-driven view of the world is quintessentially Bergsonian. Stressing the grimy, messy aspects of life, which confound intellectual systematization, he wrote that the ‘aim of science and of all thought is to reduce the complex and inevitably disconnected world of grit and cinders to a few ideal counters, which we can move about and so form an ungritlike picture of reality – one flattering to our sense of power over the world’ (CW, p. 11). Hulme works here with a nominalist and pragmatist view of language, claims that all truth-claims are the amplifications of human appetites, and refuses the scopic drive of abstract theories. In opposition to the metaphysician’s penchant for the eagle’s eye perspective, he argues that ‘the eye is in the mud, the eye is mud’ and maintains that ‘we never get pure disinterested intellect’ (CW, p. 19). The labor of poetic creation is here imagined in resolutely physical terms. Hulme’s move from classicism to anti-humanism and to a defence of absolutism in ethics and politics needs to be seen in the context of his later antiBergsonism, a position to which he moved in part as a result of conversations with Pierre Lasserre. This absolutism is inseparable from his search for a new aesthetic, since for Hulme signs of incipient social change disclosed themselves first in the realm of art. Like so many of his fellow modernists, he conceived the aesthetic as the means by which a wider cultural transformation might be inaugurated, and in his case this entailed sweeping away the assumptions of an entire system of values, the origin of which he located in the humanism of the Renaissance. One can see this position gradually crystallizing out of Hulme’s key essays. In 1912, his

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account of contemporary aesthetics still draws on the antithesis between romanticism and classicism, the latter being read as a reaction against the French Revolution and the belief in human perfectibility. The familiar emphases – order, structure, hierarchy, finitude – are mobilized to assault faith in innate human goodness and pantheistic conceptions of the art object. The poem or painting does not, contra romantic aesthetics, symbolize a transcendent realm but attends to the contours of purely material life: ‘The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description’ (CW, p. 68). This ambition is purged of philosophical idealism. The task is to find a visually concrete language to articulate perception, and this provides an adequate rationale for the writing of poems, Hulme claiming ‘that wherever you get an extraordinary interest in a thing, a great zest in its contemplation which carries on the contemplator to accurate description . . . there you have sufficient justification for poetry’ (CW, p. 70). This account already discloses the division between matter and spirit that would increasingly dominate Hulme’s thought, and which would lead in ‘A Notebook’ to the organic-inorganic binary. But here poetry is reduced to consideration of matter alone and is locked into the realm of the physical, which means that it can only offer human valuations of reality and remains trapped in contingency. By 1913, Hulme had recognized the problem and had turned to a geometric aesthetic that drew on resources from outside the European tradition in order not only to revivify modern art but more importantly to reject the humanist canons on which it had been based. The revolutionary attitude underpinning this view of the aesthetic was already in place as early as 1908, although it then lacked the precision and rigor that Wilhelm Worringer’s theories would later bring to Hulme’s work.1 Hulme wrote in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908) that literary forms are always in need of renewal. Insincerity lay in imitating extant techniques and idioms when these no longer had any meaningful purchase on reality. Because of a kind of cultural inertia, a lazy acceptance of established exemplars, the transition from outworn modes to effective new forms required a conscious act of revolt. The required changes do not ‘come by a kind of natural progress of which the artist himself is unconscious’ but ‘are deliberately introduced by people who detest the old ones’ (CW, p. 51). And Hulme, of course, is a great hater of just this kind. His advocacy of a particular view of poetry is intensely subjective, and it marks out the terrain on which his battles for its future will be fought: ‘I have not a catholic taste but a violently personal and prejudiced one. I have no reverence for tradition. I came to the subject of verse from the inside rather than from the outside. There were certain impressions which I wanted to fix’ (CW, p. 50). At this stage, it is the realization of particular psychological impressions in poetry that motivates Hulme, but by 1913 this imperative will have made way for a more general concern with the clash of ideologies. By the time of ‘Mr Epstein and the Critics’ (1913) it is clear that the art Hulme is championing not only exemplifies a new aesthetic but also heralds an assault on secular modernity itself. The anti-vitalist aesthetic is now presented as the precursor of a root-and-branch rejection of humanism, an ideology that was in Hulme’s eyes so hegemonic (and unconscious) that it would initially be challenged in the oblique realm of art.

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Hulme argued that this new aesthetic marked a return to religious convictions and political traditions that had fallen into desuetude. This linkage was so central to his entire enterprise, that to discuss his defence of the new geometric arts without reference to his theology and his politics is to risk misunderstanding his position entirely. He wrote, ‘I am emphasizing then, the absolute character of the difference between these two arts, not only because it is important for the understanding of the new art itself, but because it enables me to maintain much wider theses’ (CW, p. 270). These wider theses were at once theological and political, and Hulme’s insistence on their importance makes clear that he was not solely (perhaps not even principally) interested in tracing aesthetic change but rather was concerned with social change and philosophical debate. Hulme categorically rejects the idea that art exists and functions in an autonomous aesthetic realm. Art is for him always bound up with social formations: it participates in intellectual conflicts and contests political ideologies. I want to suggest in this essay that towards the end of his life Hulme had moved away both from his earlier hostility to democracy and from his materialism: the new art he championed was central to the case he was trying to make. Modern art and aesthetics offered Hulme a way of advocating certain political and theological beliefs, which were neither widely held nor, indeed, identified by other critics as having anything to do with the art Hulme was discussing. His position was clearly an idiosyncratic one, but this does not make it any the less important to discussions of modernism. For Hulme based his anti-humanism on a religious and ethical absolutism whose roots lie in pre-modern traditions of thought. Before modernism had properly got under way, Hulme was already calling for a return to supposedly superseded convictions and insisting that a corrupt secular age could only be redeemed by the restoration of a Weltanschauung predicated on ‘the subordination of man to certain absolute values’ (CW, p. 449). Particular tendencies in modern art appeared to him to be hinting at just such a shift in worldview, hence their importance: ‘The fact that this change comes first in art, before it comes in thought, is easily understandable . . . . So thoroughly are we soaked in the spirit of the period we live in, so strong is its influence over us, that we can only escape from it in an unexpected way, as it were, a side direction like art’ (CW, pp. 269-70). Hulme held that ‘either by nature, as the result of original sin, or the result of evolution, [man] encloses within him certain antinomies’ (CW, p. 234), but whereas in his early writing this led him to a hierarchical view of society, in the later work it results in the defence of a democracy predicated on these very antinomies. This defence derived support from the new machine aesthetic. Hulme argued that ‘the specific differentiating quality of the new art’ lay in its ‘association with machinery’ (CW, p. 282), and he saw it as ‘the precursor of a much wider change in philosophy and general outlook on the world’ (CW, p. 285). The severe geometries that characterized this machine art functioned for Hulme as analogues of his view of a fixed human nature, and he saw the intensity of the new art as ‘part of a real change of sensibility occurring now in the modern mind’ (CW, p. 266). He argued that the conception of a fixed human nature could provide the

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basis not only for social renewal but also for a theologically conceived reorientation of the human to the divine. Thus we find him at once suggesting that he holds ‘the religious conception of ultimate values to be right, the humanist wrong’ (CW, p. 455) and insisting that the ‘constancy of man provides perhaps the greatest hope of the possibility of a radical transformation of society’ (CW, p. 449). Religion and social theory are inseparable from one another here: politics is grounded in theology. It is partly for this reason, I think, that Hulme was influenced by the syndicalist Sorel and the anarchist Proudhon, for both men (despite the key differences between them) scorned the belief in human perfectibility and sought to articulate theories of social justice based on the conviction that human beings were fundamentally flawed. This aspect of Sorel’s and Proudhon’s thought dovetailed with Hulme’s uncompromising theology. The result was a series of complex arguments to the effect that certain forms of geometric art were presaging a major transformation in thought (broadly speaking, from a secular humanism to a religious anti-humanism); that this transformation entailed the subordination of the individual to a non-organic and absolute realm of value; and that acceptance of human beings’ radical imperfectability could lead to an emancipatory theory of democracy. Hulme concluded that the historical association of liberalism with democracy was purely contingent, and he argued that the idea that the link between them was somehow a necessary one needed to be destroyed. Only then could one be led to ‘a different conception of democracy – to that, for example, which is suggested by Proudhon and Sorel’ (CW, p. 409).

Politics and Pessimism In Time and Western Man, Wyndham Lewis wrote of Toryism, ‘Almost all Tories are simpletons – the simpletons of what passes with them for “tradition,” we could say – how they hastily close all the stable doors long after the horses have all disappeared; also by their rare instinct for closing all the wrong doors, behind which there were never any horses’ (1993, p. 27). Hulme, of course, was no simpleton, and neither was Lewis. Both were aware of the long-standing political tradition of Tory Radicalism, which in John Burrow’s words produced an analysis in which the past provides ‘the basis of a radical critique of capitalism and a repudiation of Whiggish complacency about the national history’ (1981, p. 241). Toryism and radicalism came together in this tradition via a shared hostility to industrialism and its negative socio-economic effects. Tory Radicals upheld paternalism and the values of landed society; attacked commercialism and plutocracy; criticized the unfair distribution of wealth; urged the moral economy of the ‘just price’ and protected the poor; and supported local self-government and small communities. The movement was anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, and anticentralist. It was a curious blend of aspects of socialism and conservatism; although it never advocated the overthrow of society, it sought to eradicate poverty, condemned exploitation, and abhorred the abuse of power.2

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Hulme has often been aligned with various forms of reactionary politics, and it is easy to see why. Many of his pronouncements lend themselves to a simple view of him as an out-and-out Tory, and he did pen a piece titled ‘A Tory Philosophy’. He was also prone to make statements that hid the complexities of his thought, most likely because he was such a lover of polemics. So in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, for example, he defines the classical attitude thus: ‘Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him’ (CW, p. 61). This bald statement is later used to underpin his account of conservatism, leading some critics to conclude that his politics are straightforwardly reactionary. This view not only misses the extent to which Toryism may itself be imbued with radical strains, but also ignores the shifts in Hulme’s thinking over time. Hulme’s Toryism may seem paradoxical now, but it belonged to a recognizable political tradition. Tory Radicalism, moreover, underwent something of a revival in the years just prior to the First World War, before petering out in the early 1920s.3 Hulme from the outset of his career combined reactionary and radical traditions in his work. Writing in 1911, he suggested that in France the only two groups trying ‘to find a thought-out consistent political philosophy are the Syndicalists and the brilliant set of Neo Royalist writers grouped around L’Action Française’ (CW, p. 164). He drew on both these traditions, a fact that testifies to the complex genealogy of his thought. But more importantly, he didn’t just combine positions that would generally have been seen as politically antithetical but subjected them to ideological critique. Two aspects of Sorel’s thought are significant here: his stress on the role played by myths in the formation of individuals’ political convictions and his diremptive mode of socio-political analysis. As is well known, Sorel held that human beings do not act mainly according to the dictates of reason but rather are motivated by powerful emotions. In a famous letter to Daniel Halévy he wrote, ‘men who are participating in great social movements always picture their coming action in the form of images in which their cause is certain to triumph. I propose to give the name of “myths” to these constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians: the general strike of the syndicalists and Marx’s catastrophic revolution are such myths’ (1999, p. 20). His own work sought to understand the role that myths played in history and to place his own countermyths in the service of political revolt. This dubious strategy was irrationalist in conception, and it goes some way to explaining not only why Sorel’s work has appealed to activists of the Left and Right, but also why Sorel himself was finally attracted to fascism. Sorel’s diremptive technique, in turn, was a form of ideology critique, which aimed to analyze out the often invisible links between hegemonic discourses. He described his diremptions as attempts ‘to examine certain parts of a condition or event without taking into account all of the ties which connect them to the whole, to determine in some manner the character of their activity by isolating them’ (1969, p. xxx). Hulme drew on both these aspects of Sorel’s work. In two articles on political conversion he argued that because no ‘intellectual conception has any moving force unless it be hinged on to an emotion or an instinct’ (CW, p. 207), conversion

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from one position to another ‘is always emotional and non-rational’ (CW, p. 209). This line of thought has its roots in Hulme’s earliest writings, where he declares that ‘general statements about truth, etc., are in the end only amplification of man’s appetite’ (CW, p. 8). Such a way of thinking may result in total skepticism, but it can also break the hold over the mind of convictions (or ideologies) that have appeared hitherto as immutable and hence unassailable. And this is precisely the effect that reading Sorel had on Hulme. Influenced by the latter’s view of myth, Hulme engaged in a form of political analysis that focused on ‘words of power’ (CW, p. 232) in order to isolate the unexamined assumptions underpinning various ideologies and to expose them as contingent, not necessary. When he wrote his preface to his translation of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, he immediately homed in on this aspect of Sorel’s thought. Referring to the connection between the working class movement and democratic ideology, he claimed that ‘the enormous difficulty in Sorel comes in this – that he not only denies the essential connection between these two elements but even asserts that the ideology will be fatal to the movement’ (CW, pp. 246-7). Hulme admits that following Sorel here presents major problems. The first step to understanding Sorel is to grasp that there is no necessary connection between democracy and socialism and to see that the link between them is the product of an ideological formation ‘with a recognizable and determinate history’ (CW, p. 249). Sorel’s method is valuable in that it offers a technique for dismantling what Hulme sees as an unexamined prejudice. And this requires people to accept that they are themselves products of ideologies that structure their worldviews: All effective propaganda depends then on getting these ideas away from their position ‘behind the eye’ and putting them facing one as objects which we can then consciously accept or reject. This is extremely difficult. Fortunately, however, all ideologies are of gradual growth, and that rare type of historical intelligence which investigates and analyses their origins can help us considerably. . . . this type of history, by exhibiting certain ideas in a concreter form, existing as it were as objects in time, enables us to distinguish the same ideas, existing in us ‘behind the eye’ and to bring them to the surface of the mind. Their hidden influence on our opinions then at once disappears . . . This is a violent operation, and the mind is never quite the same afterwards. (CW, p. 248)

Once this operation has been effected, the path has been cleared to a different view of what revolutionary struggle entails. Hulme’s reading of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence stresses his critique of liberal ideology and finds in Sorel a riposte to liberalism through which classicism is aligned with a view of human subjects as strictly limited organisms. Hulme derived his theory of human nature from his understanding of classicism. Holding that people are limited, imperfect, and therefore in need of social restraint, he argued that a radical transformation of society predicated on the belief in human perfectibility was strictly impossible. This line of thought, which has a long history and is not the sole preserve of ‘reactionary’ writers, was central to Sorel’s work but also to that of Proudhon. Proudhon, for example, rejected

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religion, deference, hierarchy, government, and property, arguing that the new social order he envisaged should be based on the ideal of equality. In his best known work, What is Property? he insisted that to practice justice is ‘to give each an equal share in wealth under equal conditions of labour’ (1994, p. 177). This conviction led him to reject both property and communism, on the grounds that the former is exploitative (a form of theft) and despotic, whereas the latter is impractical, rewarding laziness and inevitably resulting in the collapse of society. Proudhon sought to synthesize communism and property by way of a third term, liberty, which would be based on the principle of free association (1994, p. 212). But Proudhon, interestingly, had no patience with utopian notions of human perfectibility. He emphasized human limitations, arguing that the species was fundamentally egoistic and thus in need of restraint. His conclusion was that ‘The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy’ (1994, p. 216).4 Sorel, in turn, was in his early work influenced by Proudhon, and both writers worked with a theory of pessimism drawn from classical thought. Sorel deplored misunderstandings of this doctrine, arguing that pessimism properly conceived should be distinguished from the popular (and misguided) view of it as little more than disappointed optimism: Pessimism is quite a different thing from the caricatures that are usually presented of it; it is a metaphysics of morals rather than a theory of the world; it is a conception of a march towards deliverance that is narrowly conditioned: on the one hand, by the experimental knowledge that we have acquired of the obstacles which oppose themselves to the satisfaction of our imaginations (or, if one prefers, by the feeling of social determinism) – on the other, by a profound conviction of our natural weakness. These three aspects of pessimism should never be separated, although as a rule little attention is paid to their close connection. (1999, p. 20)

This underscores the difference between a pessimism that follows the dashing of reformist hopes and one that derives from established convictions about humanity and its place within the world. Hulme was in his late writings without question a pessimist of this second type, and for him this then meant that Whiggish accounts of social progress in which notions of perfectibility loom large were as wide of the mark as utopian rhetoric. Emancipatory social change was possible, for Hulme, but only if the irremediably flawed nature of human beings was taken into account. Hulme inveighed against naive beliefs in human progress, which he aligned with liberal thought and democratic politics. In contrast to the emphasis on evolutionary and organic social progress, a marked feature of late nineteenthcentury liberal theorizing, Hulme worked with a narrowly conditioned view of human development, arguing that progress should be seen as ‘one of accumulation than of alteration in capacity’ (CW, p. 242). This emphasis probably derives from Sorel’s critique of views of progress that construe it as a historical law. As one of Sorel’s translators has argued, when theories of progress posit the perfectibility of humankind and the civilizations it evolves, then progress can be made to seem ‘virtually synonymous’ with the historical process itself, and ‘history’ can be deployed as ‘a source of political legitimacy’ (Sorel, 1969, pp. xx-xxi). In The

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Illusions of Progress, Sorel claimed that such assumptions were unwarrantable, arguing that liberal democracies sought legitimacy in a false notion of progress as historical teleology, whereas in practice they were dominative social systems. Hulme was in accord with this indictment of liberal democracy. The antiHegelian in him was hostile to the idea that history was unfolding according to any discernible law and would culminate in some specifiable end.5 Like Sorel, he held that liberalism strengthened the coercive power of the state, privileged the needs of the bourgeoisie over those of the proletariat, and impoverished the political process by making it susceptible to demagoguery, manipulation, and corruption. Like the Rousseau of The Social Contract (1762), he believed that ‘there never has existed, and never will exist, any true democracy’ (1967, p. 70), and he would doubtless have applauded the latter’s bleak assessment of political realities: ‘If there were a nation of gods, it would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is unsuited to men’ (1967, p. 71). Hulme objected to the overly rationalistic view, which he associated with Benthamite thought, that the democratic mechanism would be perfected until it expressed the general will.6 Hulme scorned such vapid optimism. More seriously, however, he objected to its implicit organicism, which, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, also informed Fabian thought, leading in the case of Shaw to the notion of ‘an evolution of humanity beyond man’ (1979, p. 187). This was the view that Hulme sought always to resist, and he also took the Fabians to task for what he saw as their utopian idealism (CW, pp. 209-10). Objecting to a long-standing political tradition which held ‘that on no account must the “natural” remedial force of nature be interfered with’ (CW, p. 211), Hulme argued that social change took place as a result of ‘a consistent, constructive effort’ (CW, p. 212). Organic conceptions of the state came to trouble Hulme partly because they diminished the importance of human agency, attributing some sort of guiding spirit to the historical process, and partly because they were associated with German militarism. It was during the First World War that Hulme repudiated the argument that there was a necessary link between the ‘organic theory’ and his own ‘absolute view of ethics’ (CW, p. 365). Noting that the ‘war has greatly, to their own surprise, converted many men to democracy’, he rejected the obfuscatory mysticism inherent in the ‘organic’ theory and argued that he had been ‘driven to realise that the right theory of society is to be found in Proudhon, and not in the reactionaries’ (CW, p. 365).7 This statement helps to explain why Hulme was anxious to differentiate the arguments of Sorel and Proudhon from those of Action Française. Hulme insists that Sorel ‘expects a return of the classical spirit through the struggle of the classes. . . . Given the classical attitude, he tries to prove that its present manifestation may be hoped for in working-class violence, and at the same time the complementary notion that only under the influence of the classical ideal will the movement succeed in regenerating society’ (CW, p. 251). Having explained that Sorel wants to place the classical spirit at the service of class struggle, he adds an important note: ‘It is this which differentiates Sorel’s from other attacks on the democratic ideology. Some of these . . . are really vicious, in that they play with the idea of inequality. No theory that is not fully moved by the conception of justice asserting

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the equality of men, and which cannot offer something to all men, deserves or is likely to have any future’ (CW, p. 251). Hulme’s masculinist assumptions may blind him to the politics of gender, but he does not defend an authoritarian politics; he criticizes democracy for its failure to deliver on its promise of bringing about the general good. Robert Ferguson suggests that this ‘surprisingly trenchant affirmation of the equality of men was surely the direct result of Hulme’s experiences in the trenches, and it forms part of a larger attempt . . . to bring his most important ideas into some kind of focus’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 222). Hulme in his late writing persistently aligned Sorel with Proudhon, describing them both as democrats (CW, p. 395). He seemed to be moving away from the anti-democratic sentiments that can also be found in Sorel and trying to develop a hybridized theory of democracy that combined aspects of anarchism, syndicalism, and classicism all at the same time. Of real significance here is his reliance on an absolutist ethic, in which I think he was influenced by Proudhon as well as by his reading of Pascal. During his polemics with First World War pacifists, Hulme wrote, ‘I beg leave to point out that democracy is a little older than the tabernacles in which these people imbibed it. If I could correct their tenets by Ireton’s belief that “men are born corrupt and will remain so”, I should prefer to call myself a Leveller; for not only did they think “liberty a right inherent in every man . . . meaning by liberty . . . definite participation in whatever political arrangements the community finds it desirable to make”, but they were prepared themselves to fight for this right’ (CW, p. 362). The form taken by this invocation of the Levellers is revealing, for Hulme tempers his advocacy of their radicalism with Ireton’s insistence on humanity’s innate corruptness.8 And although the Levellers sought an extension of the franchise, they did not include women in their demands, and were prepared to deny the franchise to unpropertied wage-earners. Furthermore, in their statement of 1649, the Levellers maintained that although they sought a more representative government that would be accountable to the people, they did not wish to level men’s estates and were not in favour of abolishing private property, but wanted a system in which each man might enjoy his property without hindrance. They were, they claimed, for ‘Government and against Popular Confusion’; their aim was to reduce government ‘as near as might be to perfection, and certainly we know very well the pravity and corruption of mans [sic] heart is such that there could be no living without it’ (Aylmer, 1975, p. 154). The Levellers thus claimed that they were striving for ‘a good Government’ rather than for ‘none at all’ (Aylmer, 1975, p. 154), sentiments with which Hulme concurred. At the same time, Hulme was aligning the Levellers’ view of representation with Proudhonian socialism, maintaining that both were ‘founded on the idea of Justice’ (CW, p. 363) and arguing that this version of democracy was the only one ‘which is likely to radically transform society’ (CW, p. 363). Proudhon’s writings on justice are complex and contradictory. It is difficult, and probably misleading, to try to produce a consistent account of his views, which underwent changes over time. In What is Property?, he argues that justice is born ‘of an affective and an intellectual faculty’ (Proudhon, 1994, p. 178) and is a hybrid concept that is the product of ‘social instinct and reflection combined’ (1994, p. 183). In later works,

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such as On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, he spoke of justice in transcendental terms, describing it as a ‘universal and absolute criterion of certitude’ or ‘the eternal formula of things, the idea which upholds all ideas’ (de Lubac, 1948, p. 278). There is a tension here between an immanent view of justice that construes it as innate to human beings and a transcendental one in which it is conceived as independent of human life.9 Alan Ritter sees Proudhon’s late position as a deontological one in which the rightness of actions is decided in accordance with ultimate norms that have been arrived at on non-empirical grounds (1969, p. 66). Hulme, of course, defended a similar position in his last writings, deriving his ethics from a normative supernatural realm that he described as non-rational: ‘Values are not relative only to life, but are objective and absolute, and many of them are above life. This ethic . . . may be called irrational, if . . . those values are rational which can be reasonably based on life’ (CW, p. 411). And the supernatural values Hulme defended were, in turn, the very source of his politics. He argued that ‘From the pessimistic conception of man comes naturally the view that the transformation of society is an heroic task requiring heroic qualities . . . virtues which are not likely to flourish on the soil of a rational and sceptical ethic. This regeneration can, on the contrary, only be brought about and only maintained by actions springing from an ethic which from the narrow rationalist standpoint is irrational, being not relative, but absolute’ (CW, p. 250). Hulme’s break with secular modernity is inseparable from this deontological position: he is no longer arguing against post-Renaissance humanism from within its own episteme but asserting the viability of an alternative tradition against that epistemê. He describes his position as ‘irrational’ in a precise sense: it does not derive from and cannot be articulated in terms of humanist categories because it is sanctioned by a different ontology, one that is ‘absolute, not relative to human life, and in certain respects a priori’ (CW, p. 414). Hulme argues not only that the radical incompatibility of these two opposing standpoints must be recognized but also that ‘the religious attitude’ is not superstition but ‘is a possible one for the “emancipated” and “reasonable” man at this moment’ (CW, p. 444). The point here is to break away from the idea that the religious attitude is simply ‘a sentimental survival’, hence Hulme’s claim that he attaches ‘very little value indeed to the sentiments attaching to the religious attitude’ but rather holds ‘quite coldly and intellectually as it were, that the way of thinking about the world and man, the conception of sin, and the categories which ultimately make up the religious attitude, are the true categories and the right way of thinking’ (CW, p. 455).

Religion and Machine Aesthetics Hulme’s views on art need to be seen in relation to his views on theology and politics. The importance of these connections is particularly clear in his late writing. In ‘A Notebook’, for example, he draws on an anti-naturalist theology to defend an anti-vitalist aesthetic: ‘Renascence art we may call a “vital” art in that it depends on pleasure in the reproduction of human and natural forms. Byzantine art

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is the exact contrary of this. There is nothing vital in it; the emotion you get from it is not a pleasure in the reproduction of natural or human life. The disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes, the searching after an austerity, a perfection and rigidity which vital things can never have, leads to the use of forms which can almost be called geometrical’ (CW, p. 447). Vital art was for Hulme trapped in the historically particular and was compromised by its over-valuation of the human; it not only portrayed the world from a resolutely human standpoint but also anthropomorphized God, thereby divinizing man. Hulme’s anti-humanism is thus at the opposite pole of Nietzsche’s naturalism. Whereas Nietzsche did away with metaphysics by describing a material world that required no external source of meaning or justification, Hulme posited a supernatural realm of absolute value while insisting on its otherness, its irreducibility to the plane of the human. This enabled him to assert the authority of dogma, which provided him in turn with a rationale for his aesthetics. The resultant face-off between religious dogmatism and post-Renaissance humanism may be seen as a conflict between incommensurable metanarratives, one that had already been confronted by Kierkegaard. In The Book on Adler, Kierkegaard addressed the problem of religious authority in a critical age that no longer recognized appeals to transcendence. Adler’s claim to have had a divine revelation represented a break with modernity, which was characterized by ‘insubordination to the authority of the religious’ (1998, p. 5). Stanley Cavell argues that Kierkegaard’s attempt to overcome the confusions that have deprived modernity of recourse to religious ground led him in this text to defend the concept of dogma. Crucially, this did not mean that he tried to ‘provide a dogmatic backing’ for dogmatic concepts but that he defended them ‘as themselves dogmatic’, as carrying ‘their own specific religious weight’ (1996, p. 131). For Cavell, the key shift here is from an immanent to a transcendental view of the divine, which then ratifies Kierkegaard’s well-known ‘insistence on God as “wholly other”’ (1996, p. 131). As the latter insisted in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript: ‘God is a supreme conception that cannot be explained by anything else but is explainable only by immersing oneself in the conception itself. The highest principles for all thinking can be demonstrated only indirectly (negatively)’ (1992, p. 603).10 It scarcely needs pointing out how close this view is to Hulme’s insistence on two entirely unrelated ontological categories and his conviction that neither can be translated into the terms of the other. Equally significant was his belief that within the hegemonic secular discourses of modernity the theistic view could scarcely be articulated, let alone taken seriously. T. S. Eliot, who was influenced by Hulme’s thought, was of the same view, arguing that because modern literature was so permeated by secularism, ‘it is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life’ (1972, p. 398). Hulme and Eliot both confronted the problem of incommensurability not by trying to translate one language game into the terms of another, but rather by insisting on the fundamental differences between them, and then taking their stand on those very differences. In this respect, Eliot echoed Hulme when he claimed that the ‘real conflict is not between one set of moral prejudices and another, but between the

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theistic and the atheistic faith; and it is all for the best that the division should be sharply drawn’ (1972, p. 367). The religious worldview attracted Hulme precisely because it ratified the wider theses he wanted to maintain and enabled him to purge the language of the affects from his grammar of assent. He scorned the emotional attachment to religion and defended an intellectualist conception of belief, articulating an abstract theism that sanctioned an anti-romantic anthropology and upheld an aesthetic that offered refuge from the imperfection and mutability of the natural world. What are the implications of all this for Hulme’s aesthetics? I have already argued that Hulme was committed to a worldview he believed had been superseded by secular humanism and liberal conceptions of progress. A clue to what he was after may be found in his analysis of Bergson’s theory of art. Hulme argued that for Bergson creativity depended on the artist’s capacity to isolate some aspect of reality that the majority of people have either never seen or properly understood and then to reveal it as though for the first time. This means that artists ‘break through the conventional ways of looking at things which veil reality from us at a certain point’ and which most people are ‘unable to perceive’ (CW, p. 195). Artists are able not only to render reality with a greater intensity than is vouchsafed to most people, but also to make them grasp truths they had not hitherto been aware of. Hulme then explains why this matters: ‘Both these things are of very little advantage as far as actual art criticism is concerned, but they are distinct advantages to anyone who wants to place art definitely in relation to other human activities’ (CW, p. 204). Because art could offer a different angle of vision, uncover an alternative conception of reality, it could act as the advance guard of the kind of aggressive diremptive ideology critique Hulme wanted to apply to modernity. Hulme was one of the earliest art critics in England to recognize the importance of much of the new art. He was abreast of all the latest developments and wrote trenchantly in support of artists and sculptors such as David Bomberg, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Frederick Etchells, Jacob Epstein, C. F. Hamilton, Wyndham Lewis, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts, and Edward Wadsworth. In no sense was he an uncritical apologist for their work: he not only discriminated between artists with respect to the value of their works, but also differentiated between movements and tendencies. It might well be said that he was rather stinting in his praise, reserving his unqualified approval solely for Epstein. Of particular importance was the connection he sought to establish between the Worringerian ‘tendency to abstraction’ he discerned in much of the new art and the break-up of the optimistic humanism he despised. Hulme argued that critics attacked this art because they saw its sympathy with non-European artistic canons as a modish, hence inauthentic, form of borrowing, and because they thought the underlying attitudes it expressed were irrelevant to modern life. The latter accusation was meat and drink to Hulme, since it permitted him to claim that what was really at stake was not an aesthetic difference of opinion but an ideological conflict. He made his central point in response to criticisms of Epstein’s bold ‘Carvings in Flenite’:

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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism It is, says the critic, ‘rude savagery, flouting respectable tradition-vague memories of dark ages as distant from modern feeling as the loves of the Martians’. Modern feeling be damned! As if it was not the business of every honest man at the present moment to clean the world of these sloppy dregs of the Renaissance. This carving, by an extreme abstraction, by the selection of certain lines, gives an effect of tragic greatness. The important point about this is that the tragedy is of an order more intense than any conception of tragedy which could fit easily into the modern progressive conception of life. This, I think, is the real root of the objection to these statues, that they express emotions which are, as a matter of fact, entirely alien and unnatural to the critic. (CW, p. 258)

Epstein was the type of artist Bergson had described, a sculptor and draughtsman who rejected established styles in order to explore a new outlook on life. Hulme had argued in the ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ that the particular form of expression required by each age is deliberately introduced by artists actively protesting against ossified traditions, and Epstein, described by the Pall Mall Gazette as ‘a Sculptor in Revolt who is in deadly conflict with the ideas of current sculpture’ (Rose, 2002, p. 68), was the perfect example of the uncompromising avant-gardist. Hulme was willing to concede that most people would be baffled by the drawing for ‘Rock Drill’, the work that was to be one of the most seminal of modernist sculptures, because they had ‘no preconceived notion as to how the thing expressed by it should be expressed’ (CW, p. 258), but negative responses to the ‘Creation’ drawing revealed a more general failure to grasp the challenge of this new art, and here Hulme followed Bergson: ‘They cannot understand that the genius and sincerity of an artist lies in extracting afresh, from outside reality, a new means of expression’ (CW, pp. 258-9). What role, then, does machinery play in this aesthetic? Hulme on several occasions stresses its importance, writing, for example, that in the new art there is ‘a desire to avoid those lines and surfaces which look pleasing and organic, and to use lines which are clean, clear-cut and mechanical’ (CW, p. 279). This impetus to reproduce the inorganic forms suggested by machines is for him emblematic of ‘the new sensibility’ and ‘the culmination of the process of breaking-up and transformation in art, that has been proceeding since the impressionists’ (CW, p. 279). For Hulme, this new mode of expression is not concerned to beautify machinery in some naïve paean to the modern technological world but rather to satisfy ‘a different mental need altogether’ (CW, p. 282). What is this new need? It is essentially the requirement for an art that can not only communicate a religious intensity, but also evoke a non-humanist conception of humanity’s relation to the natural world. When treated in a geometric, monumental manner, mechanical forms offer both the durability and the stability that remove natural objects, such as the human form, from the organic realm, a strategy that insists on their fixed nature. In this conception of the aesthetic the geometrical treatment of objects manifests an anti-naturalism that proclaims a Pascalian view of human wretchedness and insignificance: ‘Man is subordinate to certain absolute values: there is no delight in the human form, leading to its natural reproduction; it is

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always distorted to fit into the more abstract forms which convey an intense religious emotion’ (CW, p. 447).11 The machine is not offered here as a template for beauty, nor celebrated à la Italian Futurism as the source of a technological sublime, nor even regarded as a social datum demanding interpretation: it is presented in abstract terms as providing the conceptual means by which an alternative Weltanschauung might obliquely be gestured at. J. B. Bullen suggests that here lies the crucial difference between Fry’s and Hulme’s respective understandings of the Byzantine art on which they both drew as a model: ‘Hulme and Fry attach equal importance to the relationship between Byzantine art and modern practice, but differ about the nature of that relationship. For Hulme it is the abstract spirit of Byzantium that lives on in modern art, not its outward formal qualities’ (1999, p. 674). The turn to this spirit is for Hulme neither a purely formalist matter nor a mode of passive imitation of older styles but rather the creation of a new art that, at most, can be said to ‘have certain analogies to the attitude of which geometrical art was the expression in the past’ (CW, p. 276). In Hulme’s understanding of it, a key aspect of contemporary geometric art was that it asserted the disjunction between the human and the divine and pointed to a realm of absolute value of a different ontological order from anything appearing in the natural world. It is perhaps not surprising, then, to find him claiming that if ‘we think of physical science as represented by geometry, then instead of saying that modern progress away from materialism has been from physics through vitalism to the absolute values of religion, we might say that it is from geometry through life and back to geometry’ (CW, p. 426). Epstein was important to Hulme as the exemplar par excellence of this transition from one Weltanschauung to another. The new art drew on archaism – as exemplified by the art of Byzantium or Egypt, for example – in order to express a controlled vigor and to disclose a profound shift in outlook. The key features of geometric art, as Hulme saw it, were stiffness, angularity, durability, permanence, and purification. The objects being depicted or sculpted were deprived of their organic, natural qualities so that the mutable could be transformed ‘into something fixed and necessary’ (CW, p. 274). The attitude underpinning this aesthetic insisted on the separation of the human from its animate form; driving a wedge between the two, it was based on ‘the idea of disharmony or separation between man and nature’ (CW, p. 274). For Hulme, the inorganic qualities of a machine-influenced art pointed to the early elaboration of a new pictorial lexicon that subordinated the natural world to a supernatural realm of value.

Satisfaction and Incommensurability In his last writings, collected together under the heading ‘A Notebook’, Hulme sketched out the basic lineaments of a Critique of Satisfaction, which would set out to dissect the often unconsciously held presuppositions underlying postRenaissance humanist philosophy, and which once again drew on the lessons of Sorelian ideology critique. The purpose of this critique was not to reduce a series

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of complex strands to a simple unity but to establish the family resemblances among them, to try to work out why certain philosophical standards and ethical canons have seemed persuasive, in short, satisfactory. Hulme’s goal was to uncover the antecedent assumptions that led the ‘truths’ of humanism to be accepted in order to argue that its entire conception of reality was mistaken and to defend the view that there exist ‘many possible different ideals, or canons of satisfaction’ (CW, p. 431). He was, in short, insisting on the incommensurability of philosophical positions that depended on fundamentally opposed premises. The geometric art Hulme had championed provided an aesthetic critique of humanism. This was now buttressed by an explicit philosophical critique, which took humanism to task for its misguided conception of the human subject and of the social order. The aesthetic theory and the philosophical critique both had exactly the same intention: to signal the break-up of humanism and to install in its place an alternative account of the nature of reality. It should already be clear that Hulme’s alternative was a dogmatic one, which insisted on human depravity and maintained that all aesthetic, ethical, and political theories had to take this as their point of departure. The religious attitude as he conceived it was to be found in Pascal’s Pensées, which articulated ‘exactly what I mean by a Critique of Satisfaction’ (CW, p. 432). Lest there be any doubt, he then added, ‘Everything that I shall say later in these notes is to be regarded merely as a prolegomena to the reading of Pascal, as an attempt to remove the difficulties of comprehension engendered in us by the humanism of our period’ (CW, p. 449). Hulme in ‘Cinders’ articulated a conventionalist and pragmatist view of reality that is at odds with his late absolutism; in the earlier piece he claimed: ‘Truths don’t exist before we invent them. They respond to man’s need of economy, just as beliefs to his need of faith’ (CW, p. 20). Hulme’s late position might then plausibly be read as a response to his need to overcome a far-reaching skepticism. When he came to question the Bergsonian solution to the mechanist and determinist view of reality, his reaction was revealing: ‘I can never hope to attain in the future any “solidity” of belief. It is necessarily only a temporary illusion attaching to the moment of arrival. Now this would be an intolerable opinion. It is too thoroughgoing a scepticism for mental equilibrium. . . . I must save myself by some comforting theory from such a scepticism’ (CW, p. 156). It is thus arguable that in response to this shattering of his peace of mind Hulme came up with a ‘comforting theory’ at the end of his life, which enabled him to posit an Absolute that individuals could apprehend and that would confirm their aesthetic choices, structure their ethical lives, and guide their political designs.12 In Dominic BakerSmith’s view, for example, ‘the appeal to religious models is made on behalf of purely cultural ends. What is at stake is a view of the nature of man with its implications for social performance in the arts and in politics’ (p. 274). But I would suggest that to put it like this is to beg the very questions Hulme asked. Another way of thinking about his late writing is to see it as going to the heart of modernism’s struggles with the competing, and seemingly irresolvable, claims of various intellectual traditions and political practices. Hulme might have meant what he said, a view that Baker-Smith seems unwilling to countenance, but which

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Robert Ferguson, Hulme’s most recent biographer, takes seriously.13 And Hulme, we should note, explicitly distanced himself from the Sorelian language of myth, with its intuitionist and voluntarist overtones, when he insisted that although the religious attitude ‘tends to find expression in myth, it is independent of myth’ and should be seen as ‘much more intimately connected with dogma’ (CW, p. 444). To take Hulme at his word is to confront a modern problem that, as Eliot later insisted, he articulated with great lucidity. For the incommensurability he identified between opposed conceptions of reality and of humanity’s place in the world points directly to the vexed question of validity claims and authority that arises from the proliferation of language-games within modernity. Authority is of course a pre-modern concept, as Kierkegaard was quick to point out; in a secular age, it is treated as a legitimation crisis. Alasdair MacIntyre traces the notion of the ‘criterionless choice’ between ethical positions to Kierkegaard, but he sees Nietzsche as the most devastating critic of Enlightenment aspirations to rationally arbitrated universal norms, and, contra Nietzsche, he argues for a return to the premodern Aristotelian tradition. (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 38). For MacIntyre, there is a straight choice here, for ‘either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place’ (1981, p. 111). The relevance of this argument to Hulme’s thought is obvious, since his aesthetics derived from a stance that refused post-Enlightenment categories of thought. Hulme did not urge an Aristotelian theory of virtue, but he did insist that his understanding of an absolute, and religiously inspired, realm of value belonged to a discursive formation that was coherent on its own terms but could never be accepted as such by those whose intellectual commitments were of an entirely different order. The key point was to show that modern presuppositions were not self-evidently and objectively correct but belonged to identifiable, and historically locatable, traditions. Hulme, like Eliot after him, grasped that once modernity’s secular premises were accepted the language of revelation, faith, or dogma would be ruled out as meaningless on a priori grounds; if ‘humanism’s alienation from religion was a condition of its development’, as Leon Wieseltier has argued, then religious dogma would be compromised from the start (Wieseltier, 1999, p. 97). Hulme defended a Pascalian position in order to insist that the truths he upheld did not derive from and thus could not be judged according to humanist or Enlightenment categories.14 He described this as an irrational position, meaning by this not that it was a voluntarism devoid of supporting arguments, but that it was grounded in an epistemê not principally structured around the operations of reason. As Hulme put it, ‘The attempt to explain the absolute of religious and ethical values in terms of the categories appropriate to the essentially relative and non-absolute vital zone, leads to the entire misunderstanding of these values’ (CW, pp. 426-7). He demanded a critique of satisfaction that would target the presuppositions informing humanism because he saw that the real ideological struggle was over basic postulates.

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The unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, question was whether the practice of debate to which he was so passionately committed could resolve such a struggle. For all his advocacy of dialogue and discussion, his faith in the irreducible value of a vibrant public sphere, Hulme clearly wondered whether it could: ‘Our difficulty now, of course, is that we are really incapable of understanding how any other view but the humanistic, could be seriously held by intelligent and emancipated men’ (CW, p. 428). There is a marked shift here from Hulme’s early pragmatist and conventionalist position. Whereas an apologist for a postmodern liberalism like Rorty refuses to make the claim that his particular vocabulary (or language game) somehow gets things right, the modernist Hulme wanted to make exactly this assertion. The difference between them is instructive. Rorty defends his version of pragmatism on the grounds that it works better, and not on the basis of veridical claims that are in his view caught up in the representational theories of truth he finds unconvincing.15 Hulme, in contrast, insists that he does have access to the truth, but he also insists that this truth cannot be recognized within humanist canons of thought. Hence the need for a critique of satisfaction. By the end of his life, Hulme was no pragmatist. Eliot was of course preoccupied with similar problems. He wrote in his essay on Dante, for example, that the Vita Nuova will not make sense ‘unless we have first made the conscious attempt, as difficult and hard as re-birth, to pass through the looking-glass into a world which is just as reasonable as our own. When we have done that, we begin to wonder whether the world of Dante is not both larger and more solid than our own’ (1972, p. 276). It was left to Eliot, after Hulme’s death, to make a stand on the incommensurability of different forms of life in the kind of caustic language that the pre-war knuckleduster would surely have approved: ‘I am not arguing or reasoning or engaging in controversy with those whose views are radically opposed to such as mine. In our time, controversy seems to me, on really fundamental matters, to be futile. It can only usefully be practised where there is common understanding . . . . The acrimony which accompanies much debate is a symptom of differences so large that there is nothing to argue about. We experience such profound differences with some of our contemporaries, that the nearest parallel is the difference between the mentality of one epoch and another. In a society like ours, worm-eaten with Liberalism, the only thing possible for a person with strong convictions is to state a point of view and leave it at that’ (1934, p. 13).

Notes 1

Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908) hugely influenced Hulme. In ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, he says simply that his own argument ‘is practically an abstract of Worringer’s views’ (CW, p. 271). 2 See for example, Larry L. Witherell, Rebel on the Right; Matthew Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism; T. F. Lindsay and Michael Harrington, The Conservative Party; and Robert Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830-1867.

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See Alan Sykes, ‘The Radical Right and the Crisis of Conservatism Before the First World War’, pp. 661-76. 4 Alan Ritter notes that although Proudhon was ‘a radical’, he was ‘a realist and a moralist as well’ (p. 3); he suggests that the biggest tension in Proudhon’s theory lies in his attempt to reconcile his desire for extreme liberty with his recognition that social restraint is unavoidable (p. 23). 5 See, for example, the scorn Hulme heaps on R. B. Haldane, an influential ‘new liberal’ at the turn of the century. Hulme mocks Haldane’s Hegelianism in his review of the latter’s book The Pathway to Reality in ‘Searchers After Reality–II: Haldane’ (CW, pp. 93-8). 6 See the essays ‘On Progress and Democracy’ (CW, pp. 219-25) and ‘Theory and Practice’ (CW, pp. 226-31). The philosopher T. H. Green, who held to an evolutionary and organic progressivism of the kind that Hulme rejected, is a target here. Green drew on Hegel for his view of a historical process by way of which humankind gradually approached perfection, and he was especially influential in this respect, outlining a view of progress that has been described as based on ‘the belief in an immanent God gradually realising Himself in the world through the idea of human perfection’ (Richter, 1996, p. 114). 7 In the preface to his translation of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, which was written at the same time, Hulme is more drawn to Sorel than to Proudhon (CW, p. 252). 8 Henry Ireton (1611-51) fought alongside Cromwell at Marston Moor and Newbury, and he commanded part of the Parliament’s army at Naseby. He argued against the Levellers during the Putney Debates. 9 These contradictory views already coexist uneasily in What is Property?, where Proudhon veers between two views of justice: that it is a social instinct (p. 174) and that it is an innate, pre-rational, and divinely inspired sentiment (p. 216). 10 For the conflict between Christianity and the mediations of speculative thought, see Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 378-81. In his conclusion, Kierkegaard asserts, ‘If a single concession is made to speculative thought with regard to beginning with the pure being, all is lost, and it is impossible to halt the confusion, since it must be halted within pure being’ (p. 603). 11 See Pascal: ‘Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched’ (Pensées, 1995, p. 59, fragment 397). 12 Nietzsche, of course, considered the kind of metaphysical stance taken up by figures like Hulme as the product of dread: ‘out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways of reason’. See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 79. Needless to say, Nietzsche’s alternative – the self-legislating individual – was precisely the position Hulme was reacting against. See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, p. 182. 13 Ferguson suggests that whereas initially Hulme picked out ‘the disturbing notion of original sin from its religious context’ in order to ‘wave it under the nose of an increasingly secular society that would have liked nothing better than to forget all about it’, by the time of ‘A Notebook’ he ‘had outgrown the need to provoke and his interest was both deeper and more personal’ (p. 119). 14 See Pascal, Pensées, 1995, pp. 58-9 (fragment 339). Kierkegaard, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, argued that the presence of a transcendent divinity was not ratifiable on rational grounds. And Karl Barth, influenced here by Kierkegaard, was also to insist on the absolute otherness of the deity: ‘If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: “God in heaven, and thou on earth.”’ Quoted in Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, pp. 68-9. 15 See Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism.

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Chapter 9

‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and Two Trajectories of Ethical Anti-Humanism Todd Avery

There are objective things in Ethics. T. E. Hulme, Collected Writings, p. 442

Throughout the course of his short but prolific writing career, T. E. Hulme was obsessed with questions of ethics. From his early, Heraclitean remarks in ‘Cinders’ – where he writes, in the opening sentences, of ‘values in art, in morals’ (CW, p. 8), and makes the relativist claim that ‘All is flux. The moralists, the capital letterists, attempt to find a framework outside the flux, a solid bank for the river, a pier rather than a raft’ (CW, p. 10) – through to his final articulation of the ‘religious attitude’ with ‘absolute’ ethical values in ‘A Notebook’, ethics is arguably the keynote of Hulme’s thinking. Ethical considerations are, at any rate, as central to Hulme’s thinking as are aesthetic or political ones; but these three aspects of his thinking can seldom if ever be comfortably separated. ‘At bottom’, as Roger Kimball has observed, ‘no matter what the subject at hand, Hulme spoke as a moralist’ (1997, p. 22). It is surely right to claim, as does Karen Csengeri, that, for Hulme, ethics alone ‘could give human life a value’ (CW, p. xxxiii), and to locate, as Michael Levenson and Richard Shusterman do, Hulme’s engagement with the ideas of G. E. Moore at the center of his efforts to develop an anti-humanist understanding of ethical values in ‘A Notebook’, his ‘longest, most comprehensive, and most considered piece of writing’ (Levenson, 1986, p. 88). And yet, notwithstanding the many critical efforts to elucidate the relations between Hulme’s ethical ideas and other aspects of his thinking, the precise character of Hulme’s final ethical position – as such, and as the most forceful conceptualization of one of two trajectories of ethical antihumanism that found expression in English modernism – has received relatively scant attention and remains an open question. Csengeri and Levenson come closest to detailing the precise philosophical motivations behind Hulme’s fervent moralizing. Writing of the similarities between Hulme and Ludwig Wittgenstein on ethical matters, Csengeri notes that each

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philosopher developed his ethical beliefs in response to positivism’s successful encroachment into the sphere of morality in the nineteenth century; they shared a ‘fear’, in other words, ‘that the modern world, carrying with it a scientific and philosophical baggage from the Victorian past, was trying to merge the sphere of values with that of science. To allow the two to be merged could only lead to the destruction of the ethical: destruction of the only thing . . . which for them could give human life a value’ (CW, p. xxxiii). Levenson, for his part, in speaking of the impact on Hulme’s philosophical attitudes in general of both Edmund Husserl’s ‘attack on psychologism in logic’ and G. E. Moore’s critique of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, also shows that what ‘struck Hulme forcibly’ in these critiques was the ways that they ‘contest the scientizing impulse’ that would ‘assimilate their subjects to some more fundamental realm’ (1986, p. 92). To be more exact, from the perspective adopted by Csengeri and Levenson, Hulme’s conception of the ethical challenges the ‘scientizing’ impulse of the two major schools of nineteenth-century English moral philosophy, utilitarianism and evolutionism, and offers an alternative to what Levenson describes as ‘the empiricist proclivities of the previous century’ (1986, p. 92). To be sure, Hulme himself justifies this critical approach in the essays he produced during his Bergson period. In his ‘Searchers after Reality’ essay on Jules De Gaultier, for example, he comments on the ‘baleful fascination’ that ‘science’ encouraged in many people during the Victorian era (CW, p. 100): ‘I never’, he writes, ‘quite realized it until I came across a faded old copy of the once flourishing “Westminster Review”, whose gods were [J. S.] Mill and [Herbert] Spencer. . . . [It] gave me the same kind of sensation as one gets from turning up a stone and seeing the creeping things revealed’ (CW, p. 100). Mill and Spencer, of course, were among the leading Victorian proponents of utilitarian ethics and evolutionary ethics, respectively. Hulme goes on to describe the historical process by which ‘creeping’ science achieved, by the end of the nineteenth century, and through a peculiarly modern Faustian bargain, a virtually hegemonic influence over all spheres of thought: ‘This dominant ideal invaded philosophy. . . . It sold its freedom for a quite imaginary power of giving sure results. . . . To a certain extent this movement was correct. But the danger was . . . when it began to consider itself as merely a scientia scientium’ (CW, p. 100). At this stage in his intellectual development, influenced by Bergson, Hulme embraces ‘art’ and (a Bergsonian vitalist) ‘philosophy’ as intellectually and ethically liberatory alternatives to the scientific ‘spirit’ (CW, p. 101), although it should be noted that he does not here explicitly list ethics as one of the branches of philosophy that had been ‘absorbed’ by science in the nineteenth century. By the time he came to write ‘A Notebook’ in late 1915 and early 1916, Hulme had altered his views considerably and, toward an ethical end, begun to embrace the possibilities that ‘science’ offered for ‘a radical transformation of society’ (CW, p. 449). Indeed, in this final work he calls for the development of a specifically scientific understanding of ethics as a corrective to the ‘uncritically humanist’ ‘canons of satisfaction’ that had emerged historically, he argues, during the Renaissance and continued to exert their intellectual and ideological influence through romanticism and the nineteenth century (with manifestations in Victorian progressivism and

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liberalism) into the twentieth century (CW, p. 430). In his critique of humanist ‘canons of satisfaction’, Hulme both disavows the epistemological relativism implicit within Nietzschean genealogy and appeals to science to ground his ‘hope of the possibility of a radical transformation of society’ (CW, p. 449). ‘Philosophy’, he writes, ‘may be a patient investigation into entities, which although they are abstract, may yet be investigated by methods as objective as those of physical science’ (CW, p. 430). But if Hulme’s attitude toward science altered between his Bergson period and the few months of remarkable productivity during which he produced both the ‘War Notes’ and ‘A Notebook’ – while recuperating in London from a bullet wound in his elbow – his attitude toward ethics underwent a no less significant shift. His transformation from strident relativist (CW, p. 441) to adherent of the ‘objective science’ of ethics (CW, p. 443) resulted in one of modernism’s earliest and most forceful assertions of the potential social-transformative value of moral anti-humanism. In ‘A Notebook’, Hulme attributes this transformation to a gradual conversion experience that provided him with the ‘foothold’ necessary to understand the ethical ramifications and applications of Bertrand Russell’s and G. E. Moore’s ‘opulent realism’ (Shusterman, 1985, p. 569). Hulme’s growing suspicion, during the 1910s, of humanism’s ‘deif[ication of] the vital’ led him to discard his ‘classicism’ in favor of an uncompromisingly anti-vital ‘religious attitude’ that allowed him to ‘position . . . his [ethical] theory at the furthest remove from an anthropomorphic perspective’ (Shusterman, 1985, p. 569; Levenson, 1986, p. 100). This suspicion was bolstered by his war experiences and his polemical engagement with English pacifists, including, in the pages of the New Age and the Cambridge Magazine, the arch-pacifist Russell himself. This fundamental ‘change in himself’ (CW, p. 442), Hulme writes, was what enabled him to reconceptualize ethics ‘on an entirely objective basis’ and to understand that ethics ‘do[es] not in the least depend on the human mind’ (CW, p. 443). The removal of ethics from the realm of ‘essentially subjective things’ represented, for Hulme personally, the result of waking from a humanist slumber (during the course of which he had embraced impressionism and relativism and, then, classicism), and, socially, the necessary precondition for political rejuvenation founded upon ‘the absolute values of religion and ethics’ (CW, p. 444) – upon, in other words, ‘the subordination of man to certain absolute values’ (CW, p. 449). With respect to the variety of modernism’s ethical experiences, it is interesting that Hulme not only discovered an inspiration to his dogmatically ‘religious’ anti-humanist ethics in the work of Edmund Husserl, but also found a confirmation of it in the work of the Cambridge moral philosopher G. E. Moore, and particularly in Moore’s groundbreaking 1903 book Principia Ethica, the work that, in Hulme’s view, had spearheaded ‘the only philosophical movement of any importance in England’ in the early twentieth century (CW, p. 440). Furthermore, in relation to modernism’s variety of ethical beliefs, this allegiance is an especially intriguing fact because, with very few exceptions, critical discussions of Moore’s impact on English modernism typically have revolved around his influence on the Bloomsbury Group. Levenson has begun to write an alternative history of Moore’s impact on literary modernism, in his argument that ‘Principia Ethica . . . has been most often linked to literature through the

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enthusiasms of Bloomsbury, for whom Moore’s most important contention was that only the love of people and beautiful objects was good in itself. But Moore had another, more direct (though less visible and well-known) influence on modernist thought – this, as one may gather, through the person of Hulme’ (1986, p. 92). In doing so, however, Levenson both subtly misrepresents the nature of Bloomsbury’s ‘enthusiasms’ and overstates his case regarding the way that Moore’s ethics most directly influenced modernist thought: Moore’s allowance, through his ethical pluralism, for a multiplicity of possible ‘goods’ is arguably more important to Bloomsbury than the specific goods he names as the ‘greatest goods’, and surely, however well known it may be, Moore’s influence on Bloomsbury is at least as direct and important as his influence on Hulme. To be sure, a fuller understanding of modernist ethics than we now possess requires a clarification (adumbrated by Levenson) of Moore’s influence on Hulme; or, to be more precise, it requires a clarification not of Moore’s influence on Hulme’s own ethics but rather of how Moore catalyzed Hulme’s formulation of the antihumanist ethical position toward which he seems already, independently, to have been groping his way over the course of the 1910s. It also requires a more detailed examination than has yet been offered of the precise relations between Hulme’s own Moore-confirmed anti-humanism and the ethical lessons that the Bloomsbury Group members also learned, and indeed more directly than Hulme himself, from Moore. It would be difficult to overstate the degree of Moore’s impact on either Hulme or the Bloomsbury Group, several of whom, in the ‘War Notes’ and in ‘Modern Art I: The Grafton Group’, Hulme savagely criticizes on ethical grounds. But it would be misleading, as a matter of historical accuracy, to engage in a territorial contest over questions such as who Moore influenced most directly, or upon which variety of modernist anti-humanist ethical belief did he have the greater impact? To borrow Levenson’s compelling description of Hulme, G. E. Moore, as a central figure in the development of modernist ethical thought, signifies ‘the name of an intellectual site, a place where intellectual currents converged’ (1986, p. 39). More precisely to the present context, Moore represents a site where two divergent trajectories of modernist ethical anti-humanism meet: he is the source, to borrow an Arnoldian metaphor, of two fresh ethical streams that fed into the wide current of English modernism. In the perhaps surprising relation between Hulme and members of the Bloomsbury set, as well as in the differences that separate their respective ethical beliefs and render them, in the final analysis, fundamentally incommensurate, there reside the raw materials for a fresh understanding of the variety of the modernists’ simultaneously critical and constructive efforts to reconceptualize ethics in relation and often in opposition to the utilitarian and evolutionist legacies of their Victorian past. Their respective reconceptualizations enabled them to construct and practice modes of ethical engagement that sought to foster, in Hulme’s words, the ‘radical transformation of society’ (CW, p. 449), or, as John Maynard Keynes put it, ‘the opening of a new heaven on a new earth’ (1938, p. 82).

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Those modernist writers who, at pivotal moments in their intellectual development, found themselves drawn to the person and/or work of G. E. Moore habitually employed the rhetoric of religious conversion to describe the nature of Moore’s impact on them. Among Moore’s Bloomsbury colleagues in the secret Cambridge Conversazione Society, Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard Woolf sang their mentor’s praises with a religious fervor befitting their status as fellow ‘Apostles’. Keynes, for example, in ‘My Early Beliefs’, a paper he wrote for the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in 1938, recalls the overwhelming effects – both immediate and lasting – of Principia Ethica on the fin-de-siècle and Edwardian Apostles, and particularly on those Apostles who would shortly become members of the Bloomsbury Group: ‘it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth’ (1938, pp. 81-2). Having participated in ‘the talk which preceded’ the publication of Principia Ethica’, the process by which Moore had shown his fellow Apostles the way toward this ‘new heaven’, Keynes could not praise too highly the aspect of Moore’s thought that he labeled his ‘religion’. ‘The New Testament’, Keynes continues, ‘is a handbook for politicians compared with the unworldliness of Moore’s chapter on “The Ideal”’ (1938, p. 92). Lytton Strachey, for his part, was so enthusiastic about Principia Ethica that, in an italic-studded letter he wrote to Moore shortly following the book’s publication, he predicted the ‘beginning of the Age of Reason’, and implored and assured his friend, ‘I hope and pray that you realize how much you mean to us . . . . This is a confession of faith’ (Levy, 1981, pp. 234-5). Leonard Woolf, as late as 1960, remembered that Moore had ‘reveal[ed] for the first time to us . . . the nature of truth and reality, of good and evil and character and conduct, substituting for the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations, in which Jehovah, Christ, and St. Paul, Plato, Kant, and Hegel had entangled us, the fresh air and pure light of plain common-sense’ (1960, pp. 144, 147). One might reasonably expect a certain effusiveness, tinged even with a kind of religious enthusiasm, from Keynes, Strachey and Leonard Woolf (whose atheistic paean to Moore invokes religious discourse by way of contrast): they were Moore’s close friends and ‘disciples’; they all belonged to a student society whose early-nineteenth-century founders named it after the body of Christ’s original followers; and, to grant the power of flattery its due, these young acolytes were three of Principia’s dedicatees: Moore’s dedication itself invokes a discourse of intellectual, if not religious, discipleship: ‘Doctoribus Amicisque Cantabrigiensibus/Discipulus Amicus Cantabrigiensis/Primitias. D. D. D./Auctor’ (‘To his teachers and friends of Cambridge, their Cambridge disciple and friend, the author, dedicates his first works’) (Moore, 1903, n.p.). The philosopher G. F. Stout told Moore of ‘the value and importance of the book’; Moore’s fellow Apostle Bertrand Russell praised Principia for being ‘a triumph of lucidity’; and Sir Frederick Pollock, a former Apostle, admired Moore’s position that ‘Ethics ought to be independent of metaphysical systems’ (Levy, 1981, pp. 235, 237). But the admiration that Moore inspired in the Apostles was

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not so universally fervent among his colleagues in philosophy.1 Wittgenstein, for example, is reported to have said that Moore ‘shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatever’ (Monk, 1991, p. 474). But despite the characteristically Wittgensteinian severity of this remark, even Wittgenstein praised Moore’s ‘great love for truth’ (Monk, 1991, p. 262); and, as Panayot Butchvarov has recently observed in his essay ‘Ethics Dehumanized’, he also shared with Moore ‘a dehumanized conception of ethics despite their fundamental differences in most other respects’ (2003, p. 172). With respect to Bloomsbury’s quasireligious veneration of Moore, however, the fundamental point here is that it resulted in Principia’s coming to be known as the Bloomsbury Bible, with Moore himself holding the title of ‘Bloomsbury’s Prophet’, as Tom Regan dubs him in one of the most sustained examinations of Moore’s ethics, Bloomsbury’s Prophet: G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy (1986). The complex imbrications of English modernism’s ethical attitudes, beliefs, and allegiances are nowhere more evident than in the fact that Bloomsbury’s prophet found a disciple, as enthusiastic about Moore as they themselves were, in Hulme, the self-proclaimed ‘dilettante’ philosopher who discovered in Moore the ‘conceptual clothing for the interpretation of life’ that Hulme called ‘religious’ (CW, pp. 433-4). This shared allegiance to Moore is surprising at first glance because Hulme harbored a marked antipathy toward the Bloomsburyans’ ethical beliefs (particularly pacifism) as well as their aesthetic theories. In his 1914 review-essay ‘Modern Art I: The Grafton Group’, for example, Hulme attacks the Bloomsbury artists Roger Fry and Duncan Grant for lingering, as Hulme saw it, in the aestheticist ‘backwater’ of English culture (CW, pp. 266-7). This is a critique whose pugilistic tone echoes that of Wyndham Lewis’s attack on aestheticism, and on at least one member of Bloomsbury, that same year in BLAST. Lewis wrote, CURSE WITH EXPLETIVE OF WHIRLWIND

THE BRITANNIC AESTHETE CREAM OF THE SNOBBISH EARTH (1982, p. 15) And for good measure, in the list of ‘Blasts’ at the end of this manifesto, Lewis includes ‘Clan Strachey’ (1982, p. 21) among Vorticism’s enemies. Hulme’s critique of Bloomsbury aestheticism also implies that the Bloomsbury artists stubbornly adhered to a comfortable, or ‘satisfied’, humanism that, as he saw it, distorted and obscured, under the banner of novelty, the ‘original’ and ‘sincere’ ‘intensity’ of avant-garde artists like William Roberts, Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who were then engaged in the creation of ‘a new constructive geometrical art . . . which is the only one containing possibilities of development’ (CW, p. 264). In the paintings of Fry and Grant exhibited in 1914 at the Grafton Gallery (which also had housed Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910,

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‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’), Hulme perceived no evidence of the ‘real change of sensibility occurring now in the modern mind’, a sensibility whose contours he sees sketched elsewhere, in the work of artists like Cézanne and Picasso. In Bloomsbury he sees, rather, ‘a cultured and anaemic imitation of it. What in the original was a sincere effort toward a certain kind of intensity, becomes in its English dress a mere utilisation of the archaic in the spirit of the aesthetic. It is used as a plaything to a certain quaintness’ (CW, p. 266). Setting the terms for what would become a decades-long critique of Bloomsbury art, Hulme argues that Fry’s and Grant’s ‘cultured and anaemic’ paintings display ‘a typically Cambridge sort of atmosphere’ (CW, p. 266): they are ‘gentle little Cambridge jokes’ representing ‘a sort of aesthetic playing about’; they are ‘a new disguise of aestheticism’ and offer a ‘cultured reminiscent pleasure’ that ultimately, following the ‘real change in sensibility occurring . . . in the modern mind’, will ‘find its grave in some emporium which will provide the wives of young and advanced dons with suitable house decoration’ (CW, p. 267). It may be worth recalling that Roger Fry, like several of his Bloomsbury friends, had also been a Cambridge Apostle and that Apostolic reverence for G. E. Moore’s ethics included a celebration of the individualistic, impressionistic ‘appreciation of beautiful objects’ as one of the ‘most valuable things which we know or can imagine’ (Moore, 1903, p. 188). So much for the Bloomsbury artists and for English Post-Impressionism in general. If ‘what is living and important in new art must be looked for elsewhere’ (CW, p. 267), then so too what was living and important in ethical philosophy, Hulme believed, must be looked for someplace other than in the West Central London district that had given the Bloomsbury Group its moniker. Hulme’s hostility to Bloomsbury expanded beyond aesthetic concerns to include ethical ones as well. Indeed, notwithstanding the hostility of his remarks on the Bloomsbury artists, Hulme reserves his sharpest critique of Bloomsbury for his discussion of the group’s pacifism. His 13 January 1916 installment of ‘War Notes’ is especially illuminating on this point; in it, Hulme criticizes Clive Bell’s pacifism, as expressed in the pamphlet Peace at Once (1915), which had been published by the National Labour Press in late 1915, and in which Bell elaborates on an idea that he had formulated a few months earlier, in a 26 June 1915 letter on conscription to the Nation – namely, the ethically pernicious ‘doctrine that a few rich and elderly men have the right to compel the young and poor to die for any cause in which their elders believe’ (Bell, 1915b, p. 419). At the heart of Bell’s pacifist writings is his insistence on the ethical value of art during times of war. As he writes in ‘Art and War’, an article published in the International Journal of Ethics in October 1915, shortly after his pamphlet had been ordered seized and burned by the Lord Mayor of London in a general conflagration of recent National Labour Press anti-war pamphlets, A war that leaves the world poorer in art or thought is, whatever its political consequences, a victory for barbarism and for humanity a disaster. A nation that would defend the cause of civilization must remain civilized; and that a nation may emerge civilized from fierce and exhausting war, that it may preserve its power for good, it is

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Hulme characterized such protests against the war as ‘disgusting whining’ and accused Bell of exemplifying the ‘canting affectation of simplicity’ that, to him, defined Bloomsbury’s Great War pacifism (CW, p. 377). From Hulme’s perspective, the ‘simplicity’ of Bell’s position lay in the apparent failure to recognize the very real threat that Germany then posed to European civilization. This was a failure of comprehension that, as Hulme saw it, enabled Bell to advocate mortgaging the future of Europe at an extraordinary rate of interest (namely, submission to German hegemony) in order to secure the purchase of relatively unreal things. For Hulme, Bell’s and other pacifists’ appeal to ‘interests higher and wider than the interests of any state or confederacy’ as a basis for opposition to the Great War represented a naive utopianism fostered by both ‘a complacent ignorance of the fact [of Germany’s threat to English security], and a method of thinking appropriate only to security’ (CW, p. 374). Hulme extends his critique of wartime ignorance to the conduct even of those men who, comprising the English Staff System, were most directly responsible for fighting the war. But his focus remains on the pacifists, for in ‘proposing terms of peace, they always behave like the sons of rich people, entirely ignorant of how money is made, and who propose to give away money which they have not even got to spend’ (CW, p. 374). In other words, pacifists like Bell had made the fundamental mistake of conflating ‘what you . . . think ought to happen for what will happen’ (CW, p. 382), and, as a result, both failed to see the simple fact that ‘we are fighting to preserve the liberties of Europe; which are in fact in danger, and can only be preserved by fighting’ (CW, p. 349), and harbored a ‘disinclination to see how big fundamental things like liberty can in any way depend on trivial material things like guns’ (CW, p. 387). Hulme uses this occasion, however, not only to critique Bloomsbury pacifism, but also to advance his own ethical agenda, grounded upon ‘heroic’ virtues both in times of war and in the new society that he envisioned emerging following the Allies’ defeat of Germany. This society would be motivated by a ‘religious attitude’ and the widespread embrace of ‘permanent’ ethical values (CW, p. 432); it would be strictly ordered, disciplined, and hierarchical. With respect to the question of ethical motivation, and of how Hulme’s criticism of Bloomsbury is bolstered by inseparable aesthetic and ethical elements, Hulme finds in Bell – described as a ‘wretched creature’, a ‘contemptible ass’, a ‘particularly foolish specimen of the aesthete’, and a ‘wretched artistic pimp’ (CW, pp. 374, 375, and 380) – the diametrical opposite to an artist like Gaudier-Brzeska who, with great ‘generosity of mind’ (CW, p. 380), sacrificed his life in heroic support of the Allies’ effort. As Hulme writes in his first ‘War Note’ on 11 November 1915, Gaudier-Brzeska died in an effort to prevent Germany from ‘settl[ing] . . . the political, intellectual, and ethical configuration of Europe for the coming century’ (CW, p. 336).

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Given Hulme’s venomous comments on Bloomsbury aesthetics and on the group’s near-unanimous Great War pacifism, as well as Bloomsbury’s quasireligious adherence to G. E. Moore’s ideal utilitarianism, it would be difficult, it seems, to discover a less likely point of agreement between Hulme and the Bloomsburyans than Moore’s ethics. Moore had been Bloomsbury’s ethical lodestone from the beginning. Similarly to Wittgenstein, however, who shared a conception of ‘dehumanized’ ethics with Moore, while arriving at it independently, Hulme discovered in Moore’s work a moral-philosophical justification of his growing ‘realisation’, over the course of the 1910s, ‘of the fact that there are objective things in ethics’ (CW, p. 442). The seeming improbability of this shared admiration of Moore – and of the fact that Moore either confirmed or inspired, but in any case bolstered, both Hulme’s and the Bloomsbury Group’s anti-humanist convictions – becomes less absurd when one realizes that although Hulme and the Bloomsburyans found the basic premises of their respective anti-humanisms in Moore, they did so by focusing on very different aspects of Moore’s thought. By reading Principia Ethica selectively, they read, in effect, entirely different books. In ‘My Early Beliefs’, Keynes confirms his and his Bloomsbury friends’ selective reading of Moore when he argues that by accepting ‘Moore’s religion . . . meaning by “religion” one’s attitude towards oneself and the ultimate’, the young members of the Bloomsbury set ‘discarded his morals’ (1938, pp. 85-6). What enabled them to do this was, in Keynes’s opinion, their almost exclusive focus on Moore’s sixth and final chapter on ‘The Ideal’, where, in the book’s most famous passage, he offers his pluralist (and therefore anti-utilitarian) vision of ‘the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine’ – namely, the states of mind attendant upon personal relations and aesthetic enjoyments. This, Moore explains, ‘is the ultimate and fundamental truth of Moral Philosophy’. He goes on as follows: ‘That it is only for the sake of these things – in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist – that any one can be justified in performing any public or private duty; that they are the raison d’être of virtue; that it is they . . . that form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress’ (1903, pp. 188-9). It is debatable whether, as Paul Levy writes, the Bloomsbury Apostles ‘seemed almost to have neglected to read the book’s first four or five chapters’, or whether they ignored ‘the features of the book that made it a philosophical classic . . . . The characterization of “good” as a simple, indefinable quality, the “naturalistic fallacy”, Moore’s Intuitionism and his Ideal Utilitarianism were almost ignored by those whom we must suppose to have valued the book most’ (1981, p. 236). Levy’s opinion has recently been seconded by Panayot Butchvarov, who argues that Moore’s ‘contemporaries in the Society of Apostles and the Bloomsbury Circle . . . found more important not [Moore’s] metaphilosophical generalities but the substantive views, defined in Chapter VI [“The Ideal”], that personal affection (love, friendship) and aesthetic appreciation (contemplation of beauty, in art and in natural objects, human or nonhuman) are the greatest goods’ (2003, p. 167). There is, however, much evidence that the Bloomsburyans read and well knew the

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entirety of Moore’s book. For example, in ‘Art and Indecency’, an essay that he read at an Apostles meeting in 1908 in defense of sexual freedom and of the artistic freedom to incorporate overtly sexual material into works of literature, Lytton Strachey offers a redaction of the discussion of ‘organic wholes’ that Moore includes in the first chapter of Principia Ethica, ‘The Subject-Matter of Ethics’ (Moore, 1903, p. 202; Strachey, 1972, p. 79). What is clear, however, is that the Bloomsburyans adopted from Moore a conception of ethics that 1) by allowing for a multiplicity of ethical goods, 2) by foregrounding ‘personal affections’ – and interpersonal relations more generally – in the determination of moral value, and 3) by defining ‘progress’ as indeed a function of those affections, eased (for them at any rate) the virtual stranglehold over nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English ethics of the classic utilitarian tradition, which had both assumed the existence of a sole ethical good – namely, pleasure – and reified the rational individual as its container. As Keynes puts it, ‘we were amongst the first of our generation, perhaps alone amongst our generation, to escape from the Benthamite tradition . . . the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilisation and is responsible for its present moral decay’ (1938, p. 93). Additionally, by insisting on the ‘nonnatural’ or ‘absolute’ character of the ‘good’, Moore directly challenged the tradition of evolutionary ethics (developed for instance by Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and Leslie Stephen) which had assumed ‘that “more evolved” is a mere synonym for “ethically better”’ (Moore, 1903, p. 50). For the Bloomsburyans, ethics is a relational concept; regardless of its being ‘simple, unanalysable, indefinable’ (Moore, 1903, p. 37), ‘goodness’ occurs – is embodied, practically – in and through a vigilant intersubjectivity that, in placing the highest possible moral value on ‘the pleasures of human intercourse’, assumes not only the equally great value of the other with whom one is engaged, but also that one’s own value as an ethical agent, and indeed one’s individuality, presupposes this engagement. As such, the ethics that Bloomsbury learned from Moore represents a challenge to what the poststructuralist ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has described as western philosophy’s ‘nostalgia for totality’ (1985, p. 76). The Bloomsburyans also, in this way, anticipate Levinas’s radically deconstructive approach to ethics as an ‘irreducible and ultimate experience of relationship’ which occurs ‘in the face to face of humans, in sociality’ and which assumes that the ‘relationship between men is certainly the non-synthesizable par excellence’ (1985, pp. 76-7). Or, as Moore’s and the Bloomsburyans’ fellow Apostle Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson puts it at the end of The Meaning of Good (1901), a book that adumbrates Moore’s thoughts on ‘the ideal’: ‘Whatever Reality may ultimately be, it is in the life of the affections, with all its confused tangle of loves and hates, attractions, repulsions, and, worst of all, indifferences. It is in this intricate commerce of souls that we may come nearest to apprehending what perhaps we shall never wholly apprehend, but the quest of which alone, as I believe, gives any significance to life’ (1906, p. 231). For the Bloomsburyans, as for Dickinson and Moore and later for Levinas, ethics is indeed ‘first philosophy’, the necessary precondition to ‘Reality’.

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In his Bloomsbury disciples, G. E. Moore fathered a type of anti- or posthumanism that would find fuller theoretical expression in the post-metaphysical, posthuman ethical philosophy of Levinas and other ethical philosophers currently working to mine the ethical veins that Levinas exposed in the 1960s and after. In a 1981 interview with Philippe Nemo titled ‘Secrecy and Freedom’, Levinas posits a distinction, crucial to ethical philosophy, that sums up the basic attitudinal difference regarding human ethical capacity which structures the opposition between what Bloomsbury on one hand, and Hulme on the other, learned from or discovered in Moore. ‘It is extremely important’, Levinas says, ‘to know if society in the current sense of the term is the result of a limitation of the principle that men are predators of one another, or if to the contrary it results from the limitation of the principle that men are for one another. Does the social, with its institutions, universal forms and laws, result from limiting the consequences of the war between men, or from limiting the infinity which opens up in the ethical relationship of man to man?’ (1985, p. 80). Having learned from Moore the ‘supreme’ ethical value of the ‘infinite’ potential of the ‘relationship of man to man’, the Bloomsburyans’ answer to this question is clear. Indeed, this answer defines Bloomsbury’s ethical anti-humanism, under two conditions: 1) if we mean by humanism the liberal utilitarian tradition in ethics that had been challenged by the aestheticist ethics of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and other of Bloomsbury’s predecessors in the art for art’s sake movement and then by the Ideal Utilitarianism of Moore; and 2) if we also adopt a theoretical perspective resembling that summed up recently by Neil Badmington in a gloss on Kate Soper’s approach to this concept in her Humanism and Anti-Humanism (1986): ‘informed by recent continental philosophy’, Badmington writes, this perspective views humanism ‘not as progressive but as reactionary, on account of the manner in which it appeals (positively) to the notion of a core humanity or common essential feature in terms of which human beings can be defined or understood’ (2000, p. 2). G. E. Moore fostered in his Bloomsbury friends and disciples a break from traditional humanism by encouraging them to adopt an ethics that, on one hand, celebrated ‘the “democracy” of art, of sensibility, the equality of the aesthetic reaction’ (Stansky, 1996, p. 250) and, on the other, demanded the relentless ideological critique of ossified conceptions of human ‘nature’ and of the rational, liberal individual that was its container, in favor of a more flexible, relational conception of the ‘human’. But as ‘the name of an intellectual site, a place where intellectual currents converged’ (Levenson, 1986, p. 39), Moore both fathered the relational ethics of Bloomsbury during the early Edwardian years and, a decade later, confirmed T. E. Hulme’s own ‘religious’ anti-humanism. Hulme’s brand of anti-humanist ethics – whose greatest inheritor and later proponent was T. S. Eliot – answers Levinas’s question in precisely the opposite way. For as he formulates his ethical beliefs in ‘A Notebook’, Hulme presupposes – as indeed he had done by late 1911 or early 1912 in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (CW, p. 58) – the intrinsic ‘fixity’, ‘limitedness’, and ‘sinfulness’ of the individual human being, and of human nature as such: ‘Man

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is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant’ (CW, p. 61). He also holds the corollary assumption that ‘It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him’ (CW, p. 61). This ‘classical view’ of human nature is, Hulme argues in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, ‘absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude [which] should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world’ (CW, p. 61). From this Hulmean perspective, the ethics of Bloomsbury and, later, of Levinas, would appear to be a reaffirmation of romanticism’s optimistic assumption ‘that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of man . . . have a chance’ (CW, p. 61). This attack on romanticism transforms, in ‘A Notebook’, into a critique and finally a total dismissal of the renaissance humanist tradition of which, beginning with Rousseau, romanticism had been, in Hulme’s opinion, the most significant recent historical expression. With respect to Hulme’s developing anti-humanist ethics, his ‘War Notes’, written concurrently with ‘A Notebook’ and therefore also composed, one assumes, with Moore in mind, offer keen insight into the practical political reasons that buttressed his final adoption of what he calls ‘absolute’ ethical values as the moral basis for a ‘radical transformation of society’ in a ‘religious’ and authoritarian direction. This direction was compatible, he believed, with a viable democracy, namely a democracy founded neither on ‘humanitarianism’ or ‘sympathy’ (CW, p. 362), but rather on ‘the conception of Justice, leading to the assertion of equality’; and Hulme subscribes to this model of democracy, ‘as I must to an ethical conception’ (CW, p. 362). The Great War, as Hulme writes in his 30 December 1915 ‘War Note’, brought ‘precision and definiteness to [his] political ideas’ (CW, p. 363). The practical political issues that it raised, and the debates in political philosophy that it engendered, also helped him to clarify his ethical beliefs and spurred him to sever, once and for all, the realm of the ethical from that of ‘life’ as the latter was conceived of by the liberal tradition which Hulme sees as both a great enemy to victory in the Great War and a chief impediment to the achievement of a ‘just’, as opposed to a merely ‘humanitarian’, mode of democracy. Two months later, on 2 March 1916, Hulme offered his parting salvo against pacifism and his final contribution to his debate with Bertrand Russell on the issue of pacifism’s legitimacy as an ethical stance. Here, Hulme brings a great ‘precision and definiteness’ to the task of clarifying his opinion that the difference between himself on one hand and Russell and other ‘liberal’ pacifists on the other, was of the nature of an unbridgeable gap between two diametrically opposed systems of ethics. Hulme not only clarifies the ethical foundations upon which he thought the pacifists had built their opposition to the Great War, but also articulates the presuppositions about human nature that inform the more purely philosophical (that is to say, less directly politically engaged) treatment of absolute ethics that he was working out at the same time in ‘A Notebook’. In this, his last ‘War Note’, Hulme asks, ‘What . . . are the two opposed ethics?’ His answer is worth quoting at length because it contains one of the clearest statements in all Hulme’s writings of the

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basis, in his general view of human nature, for the tragic conception of ethics that would be his final legacy to modernist anti-humanism. ‘Very roughly’, he writes, ‘the two opposed ethics’ may be described as follows: (1) Rationalist, humanitarian; the fundamental values are Life and Personality, and everything has reference to that. It is almost universally, but, I suppose, not essentially, connected with the optimistic conception of human nature, and consequently with a belief in Progress. Mr. Russell talks of ‘ever widening horizons . . . shining vision of future . . . life and hope and joy’. It first became widespread in the eighteenth century, and must be sharply distinguished from Christian ethics, with which it is often identified. . . . As life is its fundamental value, it leads naturally to pacifism, and tends to regard conceptions like Honour, etc., as empty words, which cannot deceive the emancipated. (2) The more heroic or tragic system of ethical values. – Values are not relative only to life, but are objective and absolute, and many of them are above life. This ethic is not, therefore, bound to condemn all sacrifice of life. In a sense it may be called irrational, if we give the word rational the narrow meaning given it by the first ethic, i.e., those values are rational which can be reasonably based on life. It is generally associated with a more pessimistic conception of man, and has no belief in Progress. (CW, p. 411)

Hulme’s description here of the ‘heroic or tragic system of ethical values’ assumes the reality of values, or of a region of moral judgment, independent of and superior to the (intrinsically limited) realm of human desires, feelings, and judgment. This description recapitulates the argument he was developing at the same time in ‘A Notebook’ about the character and viability of the religious attitude. The contrast he sets up between ‘rationalist, humanitarian’ ethics and the ‘heroic or tragic system of ethical values’ parallels the opposition he assumes, in ‘A Notebook’, between the ‘Humanist’ and ‘Religious’ attitudes toward human nature and the universe and, accordingly, between the ethical beliefs appropriate to each. Nowhere is Hulme’s ethical manichaeanism more evident than here. But what is more important about ‘A Notebook’, from the standpoint of modernist ethical beliefs, is that it is here, in his promotion of the ‘religious attitude’ as a ‘canon of satisfaction’ genuinely available to the ‘modern’ mind, that Hulme finally and totally breaks away from the humanist ideology – the humanist ‘canon of satisfaction’ – characteristic of ‘Renascence’ and post-Renaissance western philosophy in order to proclaim ‘The End of Humanism’ as such. ‘It may be possible’, he writes under that heading, ‘that the humanist period we live in, may . . . come to an end, to be followed by a revival of the anti-humanist attitude’ (CW, p. 448). For Hulme, the revival of an ethical anti-humanism – and the development of a society that accepts ‘the subordination of man to certain absolute values’ (CW, p. 449) – will depend upon the widespread embrace, resulting from a sort of mass conversion experience mirroring his own, of the ‘religious attitude’ as the only possible means of rightly understanding the nature of humanity and of humanity’s place in reality.

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Perhaps, had he survived the Great War, Hulme would have altered his ethical beliefs yet again and developed an alternative to the reductio ad absurdum of ethical dogmatism that must remain as his legacy to modernist ethical thinking. This speculation notwithstanding, however, beginning on the first page of ‘A Notebook’ under the heading ‘Risk and Ethics’ and continuing through his reflections on Original Sin, Satisfaction, Neo-Realism, the End of Humanism and of the Renaissance, and finally, on the Religious Attitude, Hulme achieves a stunning clarity regarding the nature of ‘true’ morality that arguably signifies his withdrawal from intellectual engagement in the ethical sphere – that describes, in other words, a retreat from the complexities of the ethical along a conceptual trajectory that leads him to embrace a simplified, reified, transcendent, and ultimately ‘religious’, if not precisely theocentric notion of morality. It would not be misleading to characterize Hulme’s final ethical position as possessing a catechetical certainty. In fact, that is precisely how he means his thoughts on the ‘religious attitude’ to be understood. ‘I hold’, he writes in the closing paragraphs of ‘A Notebook’, ‘quite coldly and intellectually as it were, that the way of thinking about the world and man, the conception of sin, and the categories which ultimately make up the religious attitude, are the true categories and the right way of thinking’ (CW, p. 455). Returning to his earlier claim, in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, about human imperfectability, he repeats his ‘dogmatic’ belief that ‘man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature, who can yet apprehend perfection’ (CW, p. 455), and he concludes with an explanation of the ramifications, for individual human perception of the material (physical) and immaterial (moral) worlds, of the adoption of the religious attitude: ‘The important thing about all this . . . is that this attitude is not merely a contrasted attitude, which I am interested in, as it were, for purpose of symmetry in historical exposition, but a real attitude, perfectly possible for us today. To see this is a kind of conversion. It radically alters our physical perception almost; so that the world takes on an entirely different aspect’ (CW, p. 456). In the context of Hulme’s final ethical pronouncements, Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on the differences between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ appear particularly germane, as one forceful recent expression of a recognized tension in the field of ethical philosophy that indicates what Bernard Williams has called ‘a particular development of the ethical, one that has a special significance on modern Western culture’ (1985, p. 6). In his essay ‘Ethics Without Morality’, Deleuze contrasts ‘ethics, which is to say, a typology of immanent modes of existence’, to ‘morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values. Morality is the judgment of God, the system of judgment. But ethics overthrows the system of judgment. The opposition of values (Good-Evil) is supplanted by the qualitative difference of modes of existence (good-bad) . . . . Law is always the transcendent instance that determines the opposition of values . . . but knowledge is always the immanent power that determines the qualitative difference of modes of existence’ (1993, pp. 73-4).2 Within a theological, or as in Hulme’s case, a dogmatic and religious frame of reference, ethics as the study of ‘immanent modes of existence’ – what Foucault calls ‘styles of life’ (Deleuze, 1993, p. 97) – is supplanted by an absolute system of judgment via a

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synecdochic substitution in which the part (morality as ‘a particular development of the ethical’ – that having to do with the assertion of a static hierarchy of values) is taken for the whole (ethics as, in Williams’s formulation, ‘the broad term to stand for what this subject is certainly about’ (1985, p. 6)). Ethical philosophy, then, when one accepts Hulme’s basic presupposition that the ‘religious attitude’ represents the transcendently, objectively ‘true’ and ‘right’ ethical disposition, becomes the specialized discursive vehicle for the authoritative assertion of eternal values. Hulme’s mode of speech in ‘A Notebook’, coincidentally, consists in part of declarations of the ‘rightness’ and ‘objectivity’ of a transcendent ethical ‘truth’ that resides ‘above life’: it is what Hulme calls ‘the real absolute’ (CW, p. 419). In Paul Bloomfield’s terms, the ontological truth of such a conception of the absolute is ‘mind-independent, it is dehumanized. It is not of our doing or making; it is not constructed or invented. Rather, it is there, hopefully to be discovered. There is a truth about metaethics and maybe one day we will all figure out what it is. Maybe not. Even if we cannot figure out what it is, there is still a truth. In this way, the truth of moral metaphysics, the meta-truth about what goodness is, is itself not constructed or projected. It may concern humans, but its metaphysical foundations are dehumanized’ (2003, p. 187). Hulme would doubtless have concurred with this formulation, especially given the context of Bloomfield’s remarks. Bloomfield’s description of the ontological assumptions underlying one prominent type of anti-humanist (‘dehumanized’) ethics occurs within a discussion of G. E. Moore’s contribution to metaethics in Principia Ethica that also sums up the basis for Hulme’s own ethical (or, given Deleuze’s distinction, ‘moral’) anti-humanism. It is difficult and probably impossible to know exactly why one thinker embraces a particular philosophical belief. It is no less difficult to determine why, or even how, notwithstanding the many other influences on their thinking, one volume of moral philosophy could have catalyzed ethical belief systems as divergent as those of Hulme on the one hand and his Bloomsbury Group contemporaries on the other. That it did so, however – inspiring, respectively, a transcendent, idealist anti-humanism and a relational, relativistic one – both speaks to the complex, agenda-driven nature of reading itself, and, more pertinently here, evinces the strength of the impact that Moore’s book had on the ethical thinking of British modernists across the political spectrum. Hulme and the Bloomsburyans not only believed that Principia Ethica offered a viable alternative to the evolutionist and classical utilitarian traditions that had dominated British moral philosophy during the latter part of the Victorian age and into the Edwardian period, but also saw it as the harbinger of a new dawn in ethical philosophy. Their desires for shaping the day that followed differed widely, of course, as did the practical ramifications they traced from Moore’s metaethics – his investigation into the nature of ‘the good’ as such: Hulme found in Moore’s conclusions a philosophical validation of his desire, and perhaps need, for transcendent certainty in ethical matters at a time marked by the apparent collapse of earlier objective standards; the Bloomsburyans discovered at this same time in Principia Ethica theoretical permission to pursue their radically unconventional visions of personal relations.

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But regardless of these important differences, the fact that these groundbreaking modern writers discovered, in an equally groundbreaking work of ethics, this spur to their own ethical and aesthetic innovations, confirms the centrality of ethical philosophy to the early development of modernism itself. In a recent Boston Review remembrance of Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum selects for special praise Williams’s 1996 essay ‘The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics’. She sums up Williams’s argument about the ethical content of Greek tragedy, and about two conflicting attitudes toward ethics in modern philosophy, by observing Williams’s distinction between ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’ ethical philosophy: the former offers what Hulme had called a ‘satisfying’ vision of humans’ place in the cosmos; the latter comprises a ‘stark fiction’ that, as Nussbaum puts it, ‘bring[s] us face to face with “the horrors” inherent in human existence’ (p. 38). Elaborating on this distinction, Nussbaum wonders what practical results, in the realm of everyday moral activity, are likely to follow if we share Williams’s own distrust of ‘good news’ ethics and accept his celebration of the ‘stark fiction’ that ‘confronts us squarely with “the horrors” and immunizes us against the philosophers’ “good news”’ (p. 38). Williams himself, she notes, ‘does not exactly counsel resignation, but it is hard to know what other moral attitude his perspective suggests’ (p. 38). But in her elucidation of (and challenge to) the ethical manichaeanism that structures Williams’s reflections on ancient Greek tragedy and leads him to adopt a pessimistic and ‘world-weary attitude’ with which to parry a more optimistic view of ‘human moral judgment’ (p. 39), Nussbaum not only clarifies the nature of a perennial tension within ethical philosophy between sharply divergent assumptions about human moral capacity, but also strikes a note that will sound familiar to readers of T. E. Hulme, who pursued a similar investigation of the tensions, both conceptual and practical-moral, between humanist (optimistic, comic) and antihumanist (pessimistic, tragic) ethics. As mediated by Nussbaum, Williams’s distinction between ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’ ethics bears an uncanny resemblance to Hulme’s own ethical thinking. Hulme, for example, countered humanist optimism with the tragic assumption that ‘Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him’ (CW, p. 61). He believed that the good news of humanist ‘canons of satisfaction’ was to ‘come to an end, to be followed by a revival of the anti-humanist attitude’ (CW, p. 448). Hulme also thought that thinkers like Moore and Husserl, the contemporary philosophical heralds of this attitude – which he also calls ‘religious’ – ‘in as far . . . as they free ethical values from the anthropomorphism involved in their dependence on human desires and feeling . . . have created the machinery of an anti-humanist reaction which will proceed much further than they ever intended’ (CW, p. 452). Despite the many significant differences between them, Hulme was like Williams skeptical of ‘good news’ ethics; such ethics expressed, Hulme writes, ‘the belief that man as a part of nature [is] after all something satisfactory’ (CW, p. 270)

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– the belief, that is to say, in humanity’s harmonic relation to nature. By contrast, Hulme’s own version of ‘bad news’ ethics holds as a ‘natural presupposition’ ‘the idea of disharmony or separation between man and nature’ (CW, p. 274). Hulme’s final ethical position, as he elaborates it in ‘A Notebook’, is marked by an urgent effort to rouse ethics from what he perceived as a long Protagorean slumber, and to waken it to the truth of a dogmatic, religious, transcendent, anti-humanist ethics. For Hulme, the history of western thinking from the classical age through the Renaissance and into the modern world (with a hiatus during the Middle Ages) was tainted by an ‘anthropomorphism’ that, in its ‘failure to recognize the gap between the regions of vital and human things, and that of the absolute values of ethics and religion’ (CW, pp. 441, 437, italics in text), both obfuscated the nature of ‘the divine’ and reinforced an ‘uncritical humanism’ in ethical philosophy (CW, p. 437, italics in text). The remedy for this failure, the foundations for a rejuvenated ethics and indeed for a wholesale revaluation of the grounds of ethical valuation, he thought, lay in the embrace of a ‘religious’ anti-humanism that would also bolster profound social and political transformation in a century whose grimacing first decade and a-half seemed to demand a sweeping new theory of ethics no less than, in Ezra Pound’s assessment, a new image. Contrasting ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’, Williams writes that from ‘the perspective of morality, there is nowhere outside the system, or at least nowhere for a responsible agent’ (1985, p. 178). Motivated by his positive ‘feeling for certain absolute values, which are entirely independent of vital things’ (CW, p. 426), Hulme was, pace himself, more than a mere ‘dilettante’ in ethical philosophy. Even his ethical dogmatism represents, paradoxically, an intellectually hard-won hiatus of thought. More generously, it represents one in a series of resting points for a penetrative and persistently self-critical mind. Hulme’s passionate search for ethical truth – his self-identification as a ‘searcher after reality’ – ultimately led him to adopt, in Williams’s sense of the term, an unequivocal moral perspective from which the possibility appears dubious of responsible ethical agency outside of the relatively narrow bounds of his system. Such is, of course, the nature of dogmatism, and Hulme’s increasingly ‘religious’ attitude toward ethics over the course of the 1910s clearly grants little if any philosophical legitimacy or responsible ethical agency to the type of relativist anti-humanism espoused by his contemporaries in the Bloomsbury Group. But Hulme also, as an ethical philosopher, combines the pessimistic temperament of a ‘bad news’ thinker who saw human existence as fundamentally tragic with the dignified strength of will of a ‘good news’ and, in Nussbaum’s term, an ‘angry’ thinker. He remained hopeful that, however intrinsically imperfect we may ultimately be, however intellectually limited and historically conditioned, we nevertheless can and, as a categorical imperative, ought to exercise our capacity ‘occasionally [to] accomplish acts which partake of perfection’ (CW, p. 444).

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Notes 1

The philosopher L. Susan Stebbing, in a 1942 essay on ‘Moore’s Influence’, recounts a ‘conversion’ experience attributable to Moore from among the ranks of professional philosophers, which recalls Leonard Woolf’s rhetoric: she remembers reading a paper at a 1917 meeting of the Cambridge Aristotelian Society, and then, during the discussion period afterwards, encountering ‘a man whom I had never seen’ and who ‘began to ask me questions with a vehement insistence that considerably alarmed me’. After much debate, Stebbing became ‘convinced that [my] main contentions were entirely wrong. One does not’, she concludes, ‘expect a philosophical society’s meeting to end in a conversion, yet such was the result in my case, owing mainly to the vehement and vigorous clarity of Moore and his patience in pursuing the question to its end’ (p. 530). 2 A different version of the ethics–morality distinction is offered in Natural Law Ethics by Philip E. Devine, who explains the distinction thus: ‘Philosophers have distinguished between morals and ethics. Morals concerns our day-to-day life, while ethics is a theoretical reflection on morals. Morals proceeds along its own paths, with only occasional interventions from ethics’ (2000, p. 1). Devine’s argument is that of an apologist for ‘natural law ethics’ for whom morality is – or more precisely, ought to be – deduced from ‘a common human nature’ (p. 2); hence his distressed and sweeping assumption that the ‘most pervasive problem for philosophical ethics is the absence of consensus about moral issues, both among self identified philosophers and among the rest of the human population’ (p. 2).

Chapter 10

The Politics of Epochality: Antinomies of Original Sin C. D. Blanton

It may not be amiss, as illustrating the contemporary situation of philosophic thought in the British desert, and the recognition of one serious mind by another, to recall an incident of fifteen years past. When the late T. E. Hulme was trying to be a philosopher in that milieu, and fussing about Sorel and Bergson and getting them translated into English, I spoke to him one day of the difference between Guido’s precise interpretive metaphor, and the Petrarchan fustian and ornament, pointing out that Guido thought in accurate terms; that the phrases correspond to definite sensations undergone; in fact very much what I had said in my early preface to the Sonnets and Ballate. Hulme took some time over it in silence, and then finally said: ‘That is very interesting’; and after a pause: ‘That is more interesting than anything any one ever said to me. It is more interesting than anything I ever read in a book.’ Ezra Pound, ‘Donna Mi Prega’, p. 8 Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration, the feigned ecstasy of an arrested impulse unable to reach its natural end. T. E. Hulme, Collected Writings, p. 3

The Marking Time Pound’s anecdote, inserted in 1928 into a commentary on Guido Cavalcanti, seems perfectly representative of a certain modernist enigma. Offered in a context apparently having little to do with the late T. E. Hulme, the story renders that mysterious figure of modernism’s most elusive architect by not rendering him at all. At best, Pound’s Hulme provides an echo, an authorizing bit of testimony designed to validate a distinctively Poundian opinion regarding poetic figuration. At worst, he provides nothing at all, like one of those imagist lyrics associated with his earliest critical forays. In Pound’s recounting, Hulme captures the disappearance and loss of a moment of insight, one consigned to forgetting precisely because no one ever wrote it down. The effect is hardly accidental. From Pound’s inclusion of his ‘Complete Poetical Works’ as an appendix to Ripostes in 1912 to Herbert Read’s selection of his prose as Speculations in 1924, Hulme would constitute the ghostly sign of something that never quite happened – or was never reliably put in a book. Even before his death in 1917, Hulme seems to have

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offered a supplementary signature to works only ambiguously his: a post-script added to Pound’s introduction of his poems, ‘Mr. Pound has grossly exaggerated my age’ (Pound, 1990, p. 266); a slightly cranky conduit into English for Sorel, Bergson, or the reactionary polemics of Action Française; the source of dubious anecdotes misremembered or long lost. Even Hulme’s ambiguous addition to the minor canon of war poets (as the author of ‘Trenches: St. Eloi’) is contradictory, depending on the problematic attribution of the poem originally published under Pound’s name in Catholic Anthology, 1914-15 as ‘T.E.H. Poem: Abbreviated from the Conversation of Mr. T.E.H’: either the most remarkably experimental lyric penned by a combatant or the most remarkable bit of poetic ventriloquism undertaken by a civilian. As Hulme (or Pound, if one prefers) concludes there, ‘Nothing suggests itself.’ Or at the very least, nothing suggests itself definitively. For Pound, as for so many who shared his moment, Hulme remains a shifting figure, the index of so many unexplored or abortive modernisms, more interesting perhaps than anything that found its way into a book, but quite a bit less clear. Even the precise shape of the figurative logic called Hulme remains difficult to calibrate. For his editors, critics, and apologists, his usefulness has lain precisely in such open questions. Herbert Read accordingly follows Jacob Epstein’s sense that Hulme’s ‘work lay entirely in the future’ (Epstein, 1960, p. vii). Sam Hynes implicitly accepts the estimate of Michael Roberts, that Hulme ‘was not an original thinker, he solved no problems and made no startling observations or distinctions’ (Roberts, 1938, p. 12), and credits his importance not to the actual invention of an intellectual ‘countercurrent’ but rather to the distinction of having been ‘the first to assert it vigorously in England’ (Hynes, 1962, p. xxxi). As an emblem of either promise or opposition, Hulme plays the elliptical role of the cipher, the name of a constellation significant primarily for what it merely suggests when assembled in retrospect. In 1951, for example, Hugh Kenner recounted Pound’s anecdote to remark that ‘Hulme’s accredited status as the philosopher of the 1914 avant-garde should gain the implications of this dialogue serious attention’ – but failed to mention the conversation again (1985, p. 100). The questions of whether Hulme actually matters, of what he actually implies, of whether modern art or its philosophy would look any different without him, remain. Characteristically, it was T. S. Eliot who summed up the effect most neatly and most ambivalently, with an oft-quoted counterfactual: ‘he appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own’ (1924, p. 231). More an image than a book, Hulme has played such a role often enough. Indeed the formal conventions of this figurative Hulme are marked above all else by its function as a retrospective bridge: ‘fifteen years past’, Pound recalls in 1928. His next (less temperate) recourse to Hulme, launched in 1939, would operate in much the same way: ‘I have no doubt that the bleak and smeary “Twenties” wretchedly needed his guidance, and the pity is that he wasn’t there in person to keep down vermin. God knows Messrs. Lewis and Eliot must have had a lonely time in your city [London] during that fifteen years’ interval’ (1939, p. 15). Somewhat oddly, Pound’s second recollection, following the first by a decade, names the same span, almost as if Hulme himself signified a precise increment of fifteen years, just long

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enough for things to have gone wrong in the interim. But the implications of Pound’s two fulminations are starkly different. In the first case, an increment of roughly fifteen years recalls a particular moment, somewhere around 1912, that marks a decisive transition in both Pound’s career and Hulme’s: the hardening of a poetic style in one case and the hardening of a philosophical position in the other. In the second case, Pound implicitly commemorates a rather different event: Hulme’s posthumous ‘broadside’ as redacted by Read, the very event that would consolidate the image and render Hulme as a book for the first time, recuperating a touchstone of the bleak and smeary decade (or at least that part of it carried on in the pages of The Criterion). In the first case, Hulme reacts affirmatively to a piece of aesthetic doctrine, some joint that implicitly ties his modernism to Pound’s and to the ‘accurate terms’ of a subsequent artistic practice. In the later passage, he is invoked to perform a different sort of work, keeping down vermin by the judicious application of a hard-edged but abstract aesthetic, intervening to defend the small handful of London artists left behind by Pound’s own retreat to the Continent. In this instance at least, Hulme represents (to use one of his own cherished terms) a dogma, a set of calcified positions that provide oppositional tacking points in the larger strategic fray of a culture war. As a recent reviewer summarizes it: ‘people are bad; poems don’t need to rhyme; and art is not imitation’ (Sansom, 2003, p. 14). But for all the bluff and insistence, it remains difficult to say what Hulme is, what he is for rather than against. Beyond the ready slogans of Original Sin (‘people are bad’), free verse (‘poems don’t need to rhyme’), and abstraction (‘art is not imitation’), beyond keeping down vermin, he seems to offer little that does not arrive qualified in the negative. Even Eliot would be forced onto similarly antinomic terms to situate Hulme as ‘the antipodes of the eclectic, tolerant, and democratic mind of the end of the last century’ (1924, p. 231). But Eliot’s assessment also concretizes Pound’s suggestion: Hulme marks time, but marks it against the age at large, as a series of formative antinomies. When Michael Levenson takes the task of ‘dating Hulme’ as the necessary prolegomenon to that of ‘parsing modernism’, casting him as ‘the name of an intellectual site, a place where intellectual currents converged’, he cuts to the core of such a contradiction (1984, pp. 36, 38). While critics have regularly invoked ‘the paradox of Hulme’ to account for a more general ‘paradox of modern poetry and modern poetics’ (Krieger, 1950, p. 301) or complained that ‘[w]henever Hulme generalises about historical periods he goes wrong’ (Kermode, 1957, p. 125), fewer have noted the cumulative force of Hulme’s contradictions, between romanticism and classicism, humanism and antihumanism, modernity and the set of alien historical logics that Hulme arrays against it. In each case, the materials on which Hulme fastens are designed to produce a rupture in the historical moment, to spawn a sudden contradiction or counter-association of the present. And while each lurch in Hulme’s opinions opens a new and inconsistent set of theoretical axes, each also verges closer to a realization of Hulme’s ultimate importance as a chronological wedge, a convenient name for modernism’s ongoing attempt to formulate something like a negation of the present. Part of the problem lies in the simultaneous impossibility and inevitability of reading Hulme teleologically, of reading him (for better or worse) in

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the way that the century would subsequently read Pound or Eliot. But as Levenson rightly suggests, dating Hulme is crucial for just that reason, and nowhere more crucial than where the task of dating is most confused, from about the time in 1912 or so when Pound and Hulme thought over Cavalcanti’s metaphors in silence. It is this last phase of Hulme’s thought, what Levenson rightly labels Hulme’s ‘last shift’ (1984, p. 98), that is both most important and least formed, most fragmentary and paradoxically most fully developed as something like a modernist metaphysic. It is in this last phase that Hulme not only generates antinomies but also begins to refine the practice of contradiction as an historical practice, grounded materially in the work of art. Together, such contradictions constitute, for Hulme, utopian placeholders that stand in for a still unexperienced epoch, opening the space of some non-modernity temporarily conceivable only in the terms of what it is not. In order to maintain such an impossible position, however, Hulme must not only stake out a set of tentative observations but also devise the conceptual matrix through which they can be preserved as antinomies. If each of Hulme’s critics has felt compelled to apologize for an ultimate lack of originality or polish, each has strained to name the particular quality that makes him indispensable nonetheless. That quality amounts to a method, a set of dialectical maneuvers that I wish to explore here, terms that conceal theoretical gambits in the attempt to articulate nothing less grandiose finally than the contrarian position of art, caught in an historical moment that has no particular use for it. In other words, I will suggest, the power of Hulme’s antinomies – what Lewis terms his ‘dialectical truculence’ (1937, p. 106) – activates the aesthetic as the evidence of historical alterity, as something which reproaches the historical present with its own untimeliness. What Hulme offers to his contemporaries is an idea of counter-historical form, a project obsessed with the possibility of locating modernity’s exterior. Another of Pound’s anecdotes, loosely attributed but offered during Hulme’s lifetime, may offer the most concise description of his effect: ‘So far as I am concerned, Jacob Epstein was the first person who came talking about “form, not the form of anything.” It may have been Mr. T. E. Hulme, quoting Epstein. I don’t know that it matters much who said it first’ (1916, pp. 115-16). The notion of form that Hulme propounds (original or not) is abstract but never transcendent. His antinomies attempt to escape convention and resist reification without retreating into the rhetorical folds of timelessness, abrogating what Donald Davie terms ‘the logical articulations of syntax’ (1966, p. 12) in order to break the syntax of history itself. Hulme’s conception of form therefore exerts itself most powerfully precisely where temporality is concerned. If Hulme’s work, for all of its fragmentation and contradiction, offers the ground for a reconsideration of art, it does so precisely by separating the question from that of art narrowly, in order to reintroduce a vision of the aesthetic won through the reorientation of historical time. The final suggestion of Hulme’s work, I argue, lies precisely in this antinomy: that art remains viable only insofar as it disowns the theoretical isolation of the aesthetic to occupy form and time differently, as a politics of historical shapes and configurations that generate the aesthetic as a social by-product.

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In fact, Hulme never fully articulated his ultimate view of art. As Lewis claims, the question is unmistakably central to all of his thought, from early distillations of Bergson to later assessments of Epstein, but there is much to suggest that, from 1912 on, he had reconsidered many, perhaps most, of his earlier pronouncements. His last completed writings gesture toward an aesthetic theory that is never fully unveiled. The last installment of his New Age notebooks ends by anticipating a return to the effects of his theological or medieval turn on literature, but that exposition is curtailed (CW, p. 456). In what follows, I want to suggest that it is possible to sketch the contours of what Hulme never quite managed to say (but which became a modernist preoccupation nonetheless). Moreover, I wish to explore the implications of the two tropes, related if not functionally identical, that dominate Hulme’s later thought: medievalism and Original Sin. Between and upon them, Hulme did in fact construct a distinctive and dialectically coherent theory of modernist aesthetic production, one to which his ersatz theology and truculent historicism form indispensable predicates. Put another way, the claim is quite simple: what interested Hulme and what is so interesting about him is precisely the integration of theology and history as the most rudimentary elements of a modernist aesthetic and of the effect of modernism at large. The implication of that claim, however, though equally simple in one respect, is perhaps more surprising, revealing as it does the impossible antinomy that determines the condition of modernist aesthetic production and thought at large. Hulme regrounds and salvages the aesthetic by preparing the ground for a destruction of the category. Ultimately, art reasserts its importance by ceasing to be art, by refusing the philosophical reification of the category altogether. Hulme’s distinctiveness and his importance accordingly lie in the insistence that art work differently, metaphysically, as the evidence of an epochal politics. Already in the striking epigraph to ‘Mana Aboda’ Hulme had invoked a series of paradoxes to redefine beauty as an immanent power of form, as ‘the marking-time’: a stationary vibration, a feigned ecstasy, an arrested impulse. It was that notion that Pound would recall in The Pisan Cantos as the ‘word not blacked out’ by intervening years (1998, p. 499). Indeed the project that developed over those years would expand Hulme’s premise, displacing the category of beauty and straining to replace it with a notion of art that marks time by enduring. Indeed it is that art, in all its form and deformity, Hulme seems to suggest, that ultimately writes the history of epochs. The Stationary Vibration In late 1915 and early 1916, Hulme published a series of seven pieces in the New Age, later excerpted by Read as ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’. Included as the lead essay in Speculations and echoed in its sub-title, Hulme’s notebooks circulate around a problem first broached in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ several years earlier (CW, p. 59): the need to conjure up the specter of a new epoch to succeed the current one, a modern age perpetually (in Hulme’s view) in the process of breaking up. They also mark a departure. Once that need had produced the opposition between romanticism and classicism, but by 1915 Hulme had begun to

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abandon those terms in order to articulate an emergent ‘medievalism’ opposed to the ‘complete anthropomorphisation of the world’ (CW, p. 447) and predicated on ‘the radical imperfection of man’ (CW, p. 446). Folding classicism and romanticism together as ‘two stages inside the modern period’ (CW, p. 451), the later Hulme seeks to solidify ‘these abstract things at the centre, these doctrines felt as facts, which are the source of all the other material characteristics of a period’ (CW, p. 446). Mingling economic with scholastic speculation, the argument casts medievalism not only as something that precedes the modern age, but also as the force that dispels and eventually follows it. Understood most simply, medievalism is simply everything that modernity is not, from anti-humanism to geometric art, a set of tendencies assembled to refute and defamiliarize those facts felt since the Renaissance, from the assumption of progress to the importance of personality. For Hulme, the two periods relate to each other agonistically, oscillating unevenly across history: Now it should be noted that the coherent attitude and art of these two periods have occurred many times before in history. The renaissance period corresponds very nearly both in its conception of man and in its art to the classical. The Byzantine art corresponds to many other geometric arts in the past, to Egyptian and Indian, for example, both, also, civilisations with a similar religious, non-humanistic conception of man. In the same way, then, it may be possible that the humanist period we live in may also come to an end, to be followed by a revival of the anti-humanist attitude. In saying this I do not in the least wish to imply any mechanical view of history as an inevitable alteration of such periods; I am so far from such scepticism about the matter, that I regard the difference between the two attitudes as simply the difference between true and false. (CW, p. 448)

As Hulme recognizes, the idea of a new medievalism is contradictory. The effect of the phrase depends on the assumption that the medieval represents a limit point on the spectrum of archaic forms, the ground programmatically effaced in the ongoing movement of modernization. The prospect of the new, by such a calculus, encounters the idea of the medieval by circling back on itself, searching out fresh origins at a moment when the very memory of something premodern has lapsed. More modestly, the suggestion harks back to the older medievalisms of the previous century, projections of a reflexive anti-capitalism spawned by the social uncertainties of industrial development and refitted to the demands of what Miriam Hansen terms ‘a new regime of neoclassicist orthodoxy’ (1980, p. 359) centered on A. R. Orage’s New Age. But Hulme means the paradox seriously, recasting the idea as a utopian thought-experiment designed to excavate and deny every presupposition or ‘pseudo-category’ of modern thought. In Hulme’s usage, medievalism entails no affirmative relation to the social, theological, or political structures of the Middle Ages. Instead, it conjures up a set of simple but totalizing historical differences, largely devoid of particular content precisely because they stand in less for the past than for the future. Hulme accordingly guards against misunderstanding: ‘I do not in the least imagine that humanism is breaking up merely to make place for a new mediævalism. The only thing the new period will have in common with mediævalism will be the subordination of man to certain

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absolute values’ (CW, p. 449). Medievalism is thus historical and ahistorical at once, conjoining a particular set of historical circumstances with a set of abstract forms that cut across history, occasionally determining social relations, occasionally withdrawing altogether. ‘It is only our categories that change . . . Men of different sorts exist in constant proportion in different generations. But different circumstances, different prevailing ideologies, bring different types to the top. Exactly the same type existed in the Middle Ages as now. This constancy of man thus provides perhaps the greatest hope of the possibility of a radical transformation of society’ (CW, p. 449). Paradoxically, the hope for what Hulme elsewhere terms ‘a certain sort of progress’ – ‘rather one of accumulation than of alteration in capacity’ (CW, p. 241) – reposes on the assumption that man remains incapable of alteration and thus vulnerable to circumstantial forces beyond human control. If man is constant, then historical periods themselves become radically variable, threatening to begin or end, lapse or recur, as necessary. Each epoch lingers as a suppressed alternative to every other age, and as importantly, retains the power to introduce a breakage into any other. Writing in the same pages only a few months earlier, Pound had deployed the same idea of a new medievalism to justify the programs of the London avant-garde, declaring that ‘we have begun deliberately to try to free ourselves from the Renaissance shackles, as the Renaissance freed itself from the Middle Ages’ (1915, p. 410). Adopting what would become Hulme’s language, he suggests that the practitioners of ‘a new, and to many a most obnoxious, art’ (p. 410) recall the vanguard figures of an earlier humanism even while inverting and demolishing the various forms of classicist ‘propaganda’ (p. 409) that they produced. The modernist avant-garde, under such an account, reclaims the idea of the medieval as an aesthetic instrument, a mechanism engineered primarily to leverage new forms into place. In 1915, Pound would not name Hulme among his artistic revolutionaries. Returning to the question again in 1928, however, attempting to unravel Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi Prega’, he enlisted Hulme to provide a laconic nod of critical approval for his ‘historic method’ (1928a, p. 235). Cavalcanti’s poem would provoke Pound for decades, sparking repeated attempts at translation (and even an opera) before providing the core of Canto XXXVI in 1934 – and with that one of the enduring buttresses of The Cantos themselves. That urgency derives, for Pound at least, from the simple difficulty of reading the canzone adequately, of producing a set of critical terms appropriate to a figure suspended between hermeneutic worlds, equally alien to Dante’s rich but arid scholasticism and to the later figurative practices of Petrarch or Ficino: ‘What we need now is not so much a commentator as a lexicon. It is the precise sense of certain terms as understood at that particular epoch that one would like to have set before one’ (1928b, pp. 8-9). The result of Pound’s textual reconstruction is an elaborately revisionist effort to induce those terms, one that locates Cavalcanti in an intermittently dissenting intellectual tradition, poised against the orthodoxies of high medieval Thomism and open to the syncretic strains of several mystical traditions at once. More mysterious than Pound’s attempt at philology, however, is the sudden appearance of Hulme as an unpredicated detail within the dense explication of an elusive canzone. Indeed the anecdotal Hulme seems to provide a kind of theoretical

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shorthand, casting Cavalcanti and his poetic moment into historical relief. First conjoined in 1912, when Pound appointed himself editor for each, Hulme and Cavalcanti seem to incorporate parallel medievalisms, opening the term to a dual reference: ‘Mediaevalism and Mediaevalism’, to follow Pound’s title. Invoked as a mute touchstone, Hulme suggests a series of buried arguments or associations: concerning the possibility of ‘precise interpretive metaphor’ or the critical difficulty posed in the attempt to decipher it. In context, he seems to name the lingering gap between brazenly fresh poetic descriptions and the reified forms of language that slowly accrete around and obscure them, maintaining an insistence on the absolute discontinuity between words and corporeal realities. But if Hulme illuminates (or conspicuously fails to illuminate) Cavalcanti, then Cavalcanti and his medievalism perform the same function for Hulme. After all, Hulme too would provide one of Pound’s most important recurrent references, not only in the later Pisan meditations but also in the hellish turn of the early war cantos. There, in fact, he occupies a place first filled (in the drafts of 1917) by Cavalcanti himself, inaugurating the turn into ‘the new world about us:/ Barred lights, great flares, new form, Picasso or Lewis’ (Pound, 1990, pp. 233-4). The Cavalcanti of 1928 would remain an index to ‘new form’, but he would also provide evidence of something else: ‘traces of a tone of thought no longer considered dangerous, but that may have appeared about as soothing to the florentine of A.D. 1290 as conversation about Tom Paine, Marx, Lenin and Bucharin would be to-day in a methodist Bankers’ board meeting in Memphis, Tenn.’ (1928a, p. 231). Above all, Pound argues, Cavalcanti’s medievalism is revolutionary. But to the degree it concretizes ‘the new world about us’ into something more radical than the metaphorical revolutions of the avant-garde, so is Hulme’s, triggering a set of associations that (in Canto XVI) would culminate with the eruption of revolution in Russia. Beneath Pound’s anecdote lies a rather peculiar assertion, a detour that not only affiliates the lexicon of Cavalcanti’s medievalism with that of his own modernism but locates in each a latent revolutionary principle, loosely associating the end of one epoch with the end of another. The passing reference, it turns out, is less an allusion than a sort of historical ideogram, a hybrid character forged to designate a rising series of discontinuities. Between them, Cavalcanti and Hulme first signify a disruption of linguistic forms, the interruption of a referential order built on the governing ideological homologies of their respective moments. Having decomposed the functions of language, each next connotes the possibility of a new poetics, Pound’s ‘accurate terms’ or what Hulme calls ‘the advance guard in language’ (CW, p. 27). It is that ‘tone of thought’ which Pound deems dangerous, seditiously corrosive in either 1290 or 1912. And it is that link which completes Pound’s historical ideogram, fusing Hulme and Cavalcanti into a single gesture both poetic and political. If Cavalcanti demands both a new critical lexicon and an anachronistic field of reference, Hulme implicitly presents the same problem again, of ‘Modernism and Modernism’ now, two tendencies straining against each other at the point of an epochal break. In a second moment, Pound’s acknowledgment of Hulme thus reveals a source, an encrypted reference not merely to a poetic practice but also to the critical and historical vocabulary enmeshed within it. In fact, Pound’s excursus on Cavalcanti

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undertakes a prolonged double reading, turning Cavalcanti into a figure that would haunt his own poetry, only to return also to the second figure that haunts his thought more quietly. Hulme is summoned forth to comment on Cavalcanti because he plays a functionally equivalent role in Pound’s reconstruction, but also because Cavalcanti explains Hulme, replicating the antinomies of modernism in an alien critical vocabulary that also approximates Hulme’s own. What all of this suggests, of course, is that the complex sign of Cavalcanti/Hulme, medievalism/medievalism, retains an unexpected relevance, producing one last radical transformation. That last turn, both the formal sequel to medievalism and the historical term that displaces it, gathers the allusive elements of Pound’s Hulme and effectively reorders them. Mediated through Cavalcanti and Hulme at once, medievalism begins to function as a detached historical form, intermittently renewable as a set of revolutionary effects. As such, it offers the unexpected formal core of ‘the new world about us’, remapping the Florence of 1290 onto a world of revolution, trench warfare, and avant-garde experiment. At that moment, however, medievalism (either Cavalcanti’s or Hulme’s) becomes a modernist effect as well, the rough centerpiece of Pound’s and Hulme’s collective work. Under Pound’s idiosyncratic logic, the conversation with Hulme marks the core of that exchange: Hulme’s moment of medievalism, of becoming silent, spurs a movement in two directions. In effect, the confluence of medievalisms opens a conceptual gap in the present: Medievalism

→

↓ Hulme

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[Revolution/Modernism]

When Pound issues his call for a new lexicon, for the precise sense of terms as understood at that epoch, he thus asserts two contradictory imperatives. The first calls for a philological reconstruction of the medievalism of Cavalcanti. The task of reconstructing that lexicon, however, requires the supplementary lexicon of Hulme, some philosophical apparatus that doubles and estranges its own moment, devising a mechanism to evade the intermediation of centuries. If the reading of Cavalcanti provides the missing lexicon required to chart the medieval, Hulme provides the lexicon to read Cavalcanti, closing the circuit of reference between medieval and modern. The missing term in that account is therefore not medieval at all, is not in fact named at all, except in the odd recurring gesture that transforms Cavalcanti into Paine, Marx, Lenin, Bucharin, and finally Hulme, that makes a revolutionary practice of art. If Cavalcanti doubles the trope of medievalism, dividing the period against his poetic practice and recuperating poetics as politics, then the other side of Pound’s hybrid sign performs the same work. Methodologically, Hulme provides both the surrogate and the precondition for Pound’s reading, a transit point for the work of historical translation, carrying Cavalcanti over from medieval to modern but also interpolating Hulme as an operative set of historical terms. The invocation of Hulme as a lexicon in his own

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right not only recalls the idea of a new medievalism, but also engages the deeper core of his critical practice. In the most literal sense, of course, the central detail of Pound’s story is the fact that Hulme adds nothing to it, conspicuously contributing nothing but a pause. But in another sense, it is precisely that pause which represents Hulme’s most decisive intervention. Within the delicate complex of associations swirling through Cavalcanti’s canzone and Pound’s meditation on it, Hulme offers the only fixed point of reference against which other terms can be measured. And it is just this function that Pound requires: a lexicon that illuminates its epoch. Etymologically, the idea of the epoch is defined in that very hesitation: a stoppage or fixed point against which time becomes measurable [OED, n.s.]. When Pound adduces Hulme to insist on the need for a critical reconstruction of Cavalcanti’s revolutionary moment, he returns to the same term, to the much larger pause produced in the oscillation of modernisms and medievalisms and in the tension of epochs. In effect, Pound’s reading performs a series of variations on a single term, moving outward from Hulme’s caesura or interruptive gap to the broader sequence of concepts that it anchors, temporal stops culminating in the idea of the temporal stop itself, of the epoch/epoché that marks the momentary cessation of temporal mediation. The recovery of the lexicon of an epoch depends, above all else, on the invention of a lexicon of the concept of the epoch, and for that concept Hulme offers a distinctive referential marker, performing and signifying it at once. Pound’s moment of recollection (whether it actually occurred or not) accordingly isolates a distinct turn in Hulme’s thought, underscoring the problem of historical discontinuity from which Hulme seeks to construct a metaphysical system. To a large degree, Hulme’s medievalism is simply the product of a compulsion to reconceive history in discontinuous terms, according to the rhythms of an intermittent epochality. It is from that conjuncture that Hulme begins to articulate the shape of his own moment, in a conceptual movement that folds back anachronically to distant epochs in order to forswear the nearer past: ‘One of the main achievements of the nineteenth century was the elaboration and universal application of this principle of continuity. The destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, a pressing necessity of the present’ (CW, p. 423). In Hulme’s view, the overhasty philosophical assumption of historical continuity represents a secular ideological faith, an unsupported assurance underlying even the most trivial social presuppositions of political modernity and coalescing into a functional metaphysic. Continuity thus constitutes the axiom on which all other thoughts depend: ‘Our principal concern then at the present moment should be the re-establishment of the temper or disposition of mind which can look at a gap or chasm without shuddering’ (CW, p. 423). In 1915, Hulme offers such a goal as the first principle of his method and new Weltanschauung, but (as Pound’s anecdote suggests) some rough version of the idea had already emerged as a critical trademark as early as 1912. The trope of medievalism simply marks the limit point and refinement of an argument crudely formulated in the antinomy between romanticism and classicism. Far from encapsulating a contradiction in Hulme’s thought, the movement from anti-romanticism to anti-humanism reinscribes the thesis of discontinuity, extrapolating from the isolated case of a singular historical thesis to suggest a more fundamental metaphysical tendency. What the attacks on romanticism and

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humanism share is not an object, a simple disdain incrementally projected further back in time, but a deeper thesis. In each case, Hulme sets out not to argue the failure of an aesthetic practice but to isolate the unacknowledged metaphysical implication of a regime of artistic production. In 1912, he thus assails romanticism as little more than the symptom of an ‘identification of our being in absolute spirit’ (CW, p. 68), the product of a ‘metaphysic which in defining beauty or the nature of art always drags in the infinite’. With its tendency to drift tiresomely ‘away into the circumambient gas’ (CW, p. 62) and its constant ‘moaning or whining about something or other’ (CW, p. 66), Hulme’s romanticism reifies the logic of infinitude as a style, unmooring the idea of art from any determinate context. Excluding the better historical share of artistic production, such an aesthetic claims only the narrower subjective ground of what he later calls ‘the arts with which we are familiar’ (CW, p. 272), deluding itself into transcendence through the indulgence of ‘a bad metaphysic of art’ (CW, p. 67). In a ‘tedious piece of dialectic’ designed ‘to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things’, Hulme thus insists that classicism is distinguished by ‘the conception of a limit’, a refusal to concede the question of art to the eternities of idealist aesthetics: ‘there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man’ (CW, p. 62). But Hulme would come to see even that critique as insufficient, a ‘partial measure’ that runs the risk of lapsing surreptitiously back into the very thing it despises. In 1914, he would therefore attempt to formulate the link between art and its metaphysic more directly, seeking in ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’ to ‘deal, not so much with the art itself, as with the language in which the artist or critic attempts to explain that art’ (CW, p. 268). Abandoning the language of classicism, he reframes the conundrum of art and the problem of criticism in more aggressively negative terms: The critic in explaining a new direction often falsifies it by his use of a vocabulary derived from the old position. The thought or vocabulary of one’s period is an extraordinarily difficult thing to break away from. While an artist may have emancipated himself from his own period as far as his art is concerned, while a spectator may have emancipated himself by looking at the art of other periods in museums, yet the mental, or more accurately speaking, the linguistic emancipations of the two, may not have gone forward parallel with the artistic one. (CW, p. 268)

The construction of a critical lexicon, as Hulme demands and Pound recalls it, proceeds from a moment of hesitation, of uncertainty or inadequacy induced by art itself. A genuine metaphysic of art appears only in the instant when an accustomed vocabulary (romanticism or classicism in this case) is forced into suspension and thrown beyond its familiar oppositions, compelled to reassemble previously antithetical terms on one side of some still emergent critical equation, over and against a set of terms lingering momentarily in negation. Art becomes the instrument of historical defamiliarization, claiming an almost prophetic privilege by virtue of its ability to render terms slightly inappropriate, to open a gap between the aesthetic apparatus of the subject and the actual terms under which the work operates. That gap, it turns out, is always implicitly historical, a temporal lag in

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which the work lurches as if by accident: ‘So thoroughly are we soaked in the spirit of the period we live in, so strong is its influence over us, that we can only escape from it in an unexpected way, as it were, a side direction like art’ (CW, pp. 269-70). It is this lateral or peripheral view of art as ‘a kind of side activity’ (CW, p. 276) that begins to link reactionary and revolutionary elements, fusing past and future against the present as ‘a certain archaism’ (CW, p. 280). The distant past, that is, begins to hold the place of a still unnamed and unnamable future, exactly as art opens a gap ‘when one’s mind is focussed on thought itself’ (CW, p. 276). The critical task is to look at it without shuddering. When Pound confronts Cavalcanti’s canzone, he is forced onto the problem of a work of art that remains unresponsive to the categories of modern aesthetics. But he is also forced onto a set of methodological tacks that bear Hulme’s imprint. The lexicon that Hulme provides is felt as the suspension of an explanatory mechanism and the corollary need for a new set of references, for a critical language that offers only a provisional point of reference. Less dogmas than placeholders, Hulme’s terms work dialectically, constructing a practice that sets itself outside and against the dominant field of cultural logic as an unnamed negation, in order to create the very standpoint they will ultimately come to occupy. Unlike the studied classicism or intensive manifolds of an earlier phase, Hulme’s medievalism retains its negative function, resisting the reification of a doctrine by refusing to articulate an affirmative metaphysic. So conceived, it presents a limit case to modernity in general, even as it produces an ideological corollary in the idea of modernism, moving beyond simple genealogies in order to generate more totalizing conceptions of historical form. What Hulme ultimately labels a Weltanschauung is, at its core, an incipient dialectical totality, an inner cultural logic buried so deep within the field of sociological presuppositions that it functions as an ideological horizon: ‘It is these categories, these abstract conceptions, which all the individuals of a period have in common, which really serve best to characterize the period. For most of the characteristics of such a period, not only in thought, but in ethics, and through ethics in economics, really depend on these central abstract attitudes. But while people will readily acknowledge that this is true of the Greeks, or of Brazilian Indians, they have considerable difficulty in realising that it is also true of the modern humanist period from the Renascence to now’ (CW, p. 454). What has often seemed contradictory in Hulme is actually a process of historiographical revision, moving toward an extreme formulation ultimately represented by the concept of medievalism. In a sense, the operation is entirely metaphorical, seizing on the readiest trope for everything not modern, for an alien historical logic as such. More importantly, however, the medieval guarantees Hulme’s critique of ideology by maintaining a space of historical difference, by underscoring the power of the gap or chasm even at modernity’s own boundaries: ‘the difference between the mentality of one great period of history and another really depends on the different pseudo-categories of this kind, which were imposed on every individual of the period, and in terms of which his thinking was consequently done’ (CW, p. 453). But above all else the provision of a lexicon at the gap depends on the prior fact of art, on a material object with which thought never fully coincides. The fact that a critical language trails behind the object itself requires two acknowledgments. First,

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art encapsulates a space of non-correspondence, a differentiated set of temporal zones conjoining the terms in which thinking is done with foreign matter that demands to be thought in other ways. Art maintains significance precisely because ‘the thought or vocabulary of one’s period is an extraordinarily difficult thing to break away from’, precisely to the degree that it forces such a breakage from the other direction. The consequence of that acknowledgment, however, is potentially more extreme. For art, under Hulme’s hypothesis, effectively ceases to function as art at all, as a system of representation or value. Instead, art marks time, engraving history as a system of suspended vocabularies. For Hulme, that is, art functions as epochal sediment, the historical thing left over when the words are gone.

An Arrested Impulse Of all the idiosyncratic elements in Hulme’s private vocabulary, none has proven so durably perplexing and rebarbative as the idea of Original Sin. The ‘highly disobliging doctrine in question’ (Lewis, 1937, p. 110), as Lewis calls it, pointedly resurrects a tone of thought no longer considered dangerous, bearing the hint of a modernist fundamentalism designed to annoy polite cultural opinion with a studied pose of asceticism. In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, the idea appears only briefly as a ‘sane classical dogma’ (CW, p. 61). Reformulated as the first premise of ‘A Tory Philosophy’ a few months later (CW, p. 232), it begins to bind the strands of an eccentric conservatism to Hulme’s aesthetic polemics. But it is on the contradictory knot of Original Sin that Hulme predicates the series of antinomies that anchor the successive twists of his emergent Weltanschauung. In 1912, Original Sin thus marks the relatively simple disparity between liberal and conservative political positions. By 1915, with Hulme’s translation of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, it has begun to do more, concocting an odd mixture of anarchism and Marx, Proudhon and Maurras, to divide the austere pessimism of a Tory radicalism from the bourgeois center (CW, pp. 251-2). With each turn, Hulme expands the orbit of his oppositions, first absorbing romanticism and classicism as surrogate political terminologies, stylistic registers of liberalism or conservatism respectively, only to recast those political positions again in the antinomy between humanism and its opposite. Through it all, however, Original Sin remains the axis and dividing line of Hulme’s later thought, the one constant around which other terms array themselves. At its simplest, Original Sin is merely an abbreviation, a phrase standing against all that Hulme opposes. As he puts it in his preface to Sorel, ‘We may define Romantics, then, as all who do not believe in the Fall of Man. It is this opposition which in reality lies at the root of most of the other divisions in social and political thought’ (CW, p. 250). More importantly, however, it is the notion that Hulme names Original Sin that guarantees a vocabulary of historical discontinuity by decomposing time. If the idea originates as a political slogan, it assumes a broader usage with the last fragmentary meditations on humanism, marking the limit of a modern imagination in general, defined now by the fact that it ‘exhibits the same complete inability to realise the meaning of the dogma’ (CW, p. 446). If the idea first draws a subjective distinction, that is,

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between political orientations and then between artistic styles, it is progressively rendered more objective and more absolute, recoded first as a contradictory set of social determinations (affiliated most obviously with religion and class) and then as an absolute historical difference, the truth of a looming gulf between modernity and the lost attitude of that epoch which preceded it. Hulme’s turn after 1912 is simply the dilemma of Original Sin, the record of an attempt to decide not what it is but rather where it can be deployed most comprehensively. Boisterously provocative, Hulme’s private trademark – ‘such an original thing to have taken notice of’, as Lewis mocks (1937, p. 108) – has little to do with theology or theodicy: indeed God and religion as such play no particular part in it. The originality of the notion lies entirely in its obdurate refusal not merely of progressive models of social evolution, but also of the anthropological conceit of an ennobled humanity (opposed, for example, to Chesterton’s more benign liberal recuperation of ‘an obviously unattractive idea’ a few years earlier (1908, p. 292)). What Hulme struggles to name with Original Sin is rather a particular form of interrupted historicity, an idea of finitude entrenched against any idea of metaphysical continuity. The ease with which it functions as a mere slogan, either a stubborn bit of petulance or an easily recognizable piece of doctrinal orthodoxy (as in Eliot’s later recuperation) has largely obscured the extent to which the idea remains the most oddly concrete part of Hulme’s lexicon, both his most paradoxically original contribution and his closest approach to the articulation of a contrary or negative metaphysic. For Hulme, Original Sin offers a programmatic refutation of the assumption that continuity represents ‘an inevitable constituent of reality itself’. Grounded in what Pascal terms ‘the natural unhappiness of our feeble mortal condition, so wretched that nothing can console us’ (1995, p. 38), it forms a categorical wedge between the life-worlds of biology, psychology, and history on one side and the impersonal absolute logics of reason and ethics on the other, between inductive and deductive conceptual structures. In Hulme’s version, those two realms remain incommensurably askew, encountering each other only in the homological fallacy of something like a Kantian transcendental deduction. Original Sin thus constitutes a phenomenological given, a simple stipulation of finitude that inflects the possibility of every subsequent philosophical statement. To the degree that it implies an elusive absolute, Original Sin paradoxically ensures that every attempt at its articulation remains tentative, aware of its own chasms. Metaphorically then, Original Sin is the name of a negation, the sign of a travelling gap between the limited reference of language and the scale of all that exceeds naming. More pragmatically, it reproaches the claims of the philosophical subject, insisting on the historical inadequacy of humanism’s more affirmative selfdelusions. Even in the process of excoriating humanism, however, Hulme freely plunders its most useful points of contradiction. In a stricter sense, Original Sin also represents a tactical rejoinder to the achievement of the nineteenth century. Despite its ancient anti-pelagian resonances, the trope more aggressively redeploys the logic of idealism against itself, turning the very emblem of humanist progress into the conceit of its negation. Hulme takes notice of Original Sin, that is, not because it is original but precisely because it is not, because its restoration introduces a

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lacuna into the very structure of modern time. The most powerful modern reappropriation of Original Sin is offered by Hegel, for whom the myth presents ‘a profound truth’ regarding ‘this state of inward breach’ to which ‘the whole finite action of thought and will belongs’ (1975, p. 44). In essence, Original Sin allegorizes the development of philosophical logic itself, tracing the process of abstraction through which division is reconstituted as unity and encoding the world as a set of historical determinations to be overcome. In its Hegelian version, the myth reflects the entire course of historical development, charting the process through which labor imposes order on an ‘immediate and mentally undeveloped’ state of natural existence and man emerges as ‘a free substance which is in the position of not allowing itself to be determined by natural impulse’ (Hegel, 1967, p. 231). But if Original Sin provides the ground of the subject’s claim to individual freedom, it also enforces a more general collective necessity, an order of determination set in dialectical motion by the very labor required to overcome it. Inevitably and continuously, sin is reincorporated as the negative predicate of an ultimate philosophical redemption, a mythological spur to the operation of reason in time: freedom from a state of innocence comes at the price of logical necessity. In answer to Hegel’s reappropriation, Kierkegaard strains to reclaim Original Sin as the site of a logical breakage, a point of interruption within the history of reason. Rather than allowing the fall ‘to drift into logical movement as does Hegel’ (1980, p. 30), Kierkegaard insists on sin’s dual function as a point of historical origin and a recurrent moment of existential decision, renewed and retraced again with the life of each individual. In the repetition of the fall, sin reinaugurates historical time (as Kierkegaard puts it) ‘with the first, with the leap, with the suddenness of the enigmatic’. Only with the repetition of Original Sin in a moment ‘in which time and eternity touch each other’, Kierkegaard argues, ‘does history begin’, and within such a radically discontinuous moment ‘the concept of temporality is posited’ (p. 89). But a history and a concept of temporality so inaugurated, with all the suddenness of the enigmatic, begin perpetually, stuttering unevenly into grinding motion. With none of Hegel’s smooth assurance, Kierkegaard’s reinscription revokes the illusion of historical continuity, suspending any historical grammar that might ensure a logically unbroken flow of time and insisting instead upon the radical limitation of a normalizing historical logic. With Kierkegaard’s turn, no single moment of origin exercises a determinate influence on another. Instead, the formal semblance of multiple leaps opens history endlessly to rearticulation and redirection, to moments when logic falters at the theological prospect of decision. Stripped of its more orthodox commitments, that revision provides the ground for a range of later philosophical departures, accounts that secularize and revisit the trope in an altered form through the provisional concept of temporality that it produces. Echoed in Freud’s return of the repressed and still more pervasively in Heidegger’s attempt to presuppose ‘a more primordial temporality’ (1962, p. 497) than everyday or ordinary time, such a concept of temporality progressively reduces the subject to a more paltry size and interposes a categorical obstacle to the rhetoric of infinitude. When Hulme turns to Original Sin, then, he returns to the problem of finitude in more general terms, searching for a concept of temporal difference, for a mechanism to guarantee historical gaps and

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limit the ideological claim of the present to an indefinite extension across time. More pointedly perhaps, he returns also to the theoretical crux of the critique of what Carl Schmitt would identify a few years later as political romanticism, predicated precisely on ‘the denial of original sin’ (1986, p. 3). In effect, Hulme’s embrace of Original Sin transforms the rhetoric of anti-romanticism into a revolutionary politics of its own, redeploying the concept of temporality to insist on the radical contingency of historical moments and on the availability of the present to a sudden dislocation. In the end, the antinomies of Original Sin devolve on the deeper forms of temporality itself, on the question of whether history remains open to an unforeseen seizure by something quintessentially alien. Already in 1825, one of Hulme’s most familiar targets had formulated the case for a romantic theology in just such terms, constructing the association between temporality and Original Sin to which Hulme so frequently returns in contrary fashion. Searching for ‘the precise import of the scriptural doctrine of Original Sin’, Coleridge had located its consequence in the supposition ‘that the subject stands in no relation whatever to Time, can neither be called in time nor out of time; but that all relations of Time are as alien and heterogeneous in this question, as the relations and attributes of Space . . . are to our Affections and Moral Feeling’ (p. 287). For Coleridge, the fall of man specifies ‘the ground and condition of the attribute which constitutes him Man’ (p. 285), a freedom of will that lifts the subject out of its temporal entanglements and orientates its action toward eternity instead. For such a subject, the myth retains its historical resonance only insofar as it regulates what Paul de Man terms romanticism’s ‘constitutive temporal element’, its reliance on the ‘pure anteriority’ of a previous allegorical sign ‘with which it can never coincide’ (1983, p. 207). The subject’s need to retain ‘a distance in relation to its own origin’, in other words, requires that Original Sin be banished to an irrecoverable past, conceivable only through the mediated significations of an allegorical structure designed precisely to maintain the non-identity of present and past. Abandoning the identitarian logic of the symbol, romantic allegory thus ‘prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self’. Recoiling into ‘the void of this temporal difference,’ allegory thus offers as its compensation a recognition that the past remains definitively past, the negated precondition of the subject’s resistance to temporal incursion, pragmatically effacing the very void from which it springs. To insist again on the lingering historical power of Original Sin, on the fact of the unfilled chasm, forecloses the melancholic consolations of allegory, relocating the concept of temporality from pure anteriority to a still undescribed future. For Hulme, that is, the promise of Original Sin lies in the simple possibility that it might prove original once again. Hulme’s notion therefore alters the rhetoric of temporality in one fundamental way. The reinscription of Original Sin as properly historical, as the moment when history begins (and potentially begins again), detaches the past from its distance, importing it into the present as the possibility of a new origin. For Hulme, Original Sin operates not in a dim memory but rather in an iterable present, one palpably linked to the past through a sudden rupture in time. Taken seriously, that is, Original Sin presumes an identification not with a

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self cut off from an anterior moment, but rather the embrace of a non-self that might return at any time. If indeed ‘the antinomies of his poetics’ qualify Hulme as a ‘modern allegorist’ (as Hansen suggests), they therefore do so in a uniquely fractured fashion (1980, pp. 376, 377). What Hulme in fact propounds, from the early doctrine of the image to the dogma of Original Sin, is a figurative third term beyond symbol and allegory altogether, a broken allegory predicated on the capacity of the past to reoriginate, to emerge as a radically finite answer to the infinite claims of the subject. Original Sin thus stands in as the historical rejoinder to romantic subjectivity, holding the place of history itself in an anticipation of the repetition of epochs and the return of historical difference. To that degree, medievalism and Original Sin relate to each other as content and form, dialectically linked facets of the concept of temporality, fused into a politics of epochality. Having abandoned the stable intermediation of the subject, however, such a politics requires an objective point of contact between one historical moment and another, a complex that straddles the concept of temporality itself. For Hulme, the end of humanism demands the fabrication of an apparatus that records time in longer spans and intervals than those of any individual, some surface upon which history inscribes itself more deliberately, something that lasts. It is accordingly that the ‘side activity’ of art asserts itself at last.

Its Natural End In July 1917, two months before Hulme’s death, The Monist printed an unsigned review of the English edition of Reflections on Violence. Authored by T. S. Eliot, the piece fastens on ‘that violent and bitter reaction against romanticism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our time’ in order to explore ‘the scepticism of the present . . . a torturing vacuity which has developed the craving for belief’ (1917, p. 478; attributed by Csengeri, CW, pp. xxvii-xxviii; see also Schuchard, 1916). Unsurprisingly perhaps, Eliot betrays an ambivalence regarding Sorel’s program, choosing to subordinate its ‘political propaganda’ to a deeper set of social tendencies that motivate contempt for the cultural forms of bourgeois democracy in general. The resulting figure is predictably Eliotic: ‘He hates the middle classes, he hates middle-class democracy and middle-class socialism; but he does not hates [sic] these things as a champion of the rights of the people, he hates them as a middle-class intellectual hates’. What Eliot finds valuable in Sorel, it seems, is precisely the lack of an affirmative politics. Violence, expressed most programmatically for Sorel in the myth of the general strike, amounts to little more than a useful reflexive disruption of romantic or bourgeois culture. Indeed those terms are effectively synonymous under such an account, sufficiently intertwined at least to leave each vulnerable to the same active response, to ‘very devious ways’ that tactically equate royalism and revolutionary upheaval, reaction and revolt. Like his Hulme a few years later, Eliot’s Sorel emerges as a contradictory and unfulfilled figure: ‘He is representative of the present generation, sick with its own knowledge of history, with the dissolving outlines of liberal thought, with humanitarianism. He

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longs for a narrow, intolerant, creative society with sharp divisions. He longs for the pessimistic, classical view. And this longing is healthy’ (1917, p. 479). In 1917, Eliot’s formulation is softly mediated by the specter of Hulme, whose preface receives only a brief concluding notice: ‘Mr. Hulme is also a contemporary. The footnotes to his introduction should be read’. In 1924, however, Eliot’s commentary in The Criterion would revive the early characterization of Sorel to explain Hulme himself, formulating the political paradox at his core once again: ‘Classicism is in a sense reactionary, but it must be in a profounder sense revolutionary. A new classical age will be reached when the dogma, or ideology, of the critics is so modified by contact with creative writing, and when the creative writers are so permeated by the new dogma, that a state of equilibrium is reached’ (1924, p. 232). Of course, Hulme himself had slowly recloaked the idea of classicism in the language of Original Sin and replaced the vision of a new classical age with that of a new medievalism, but Eliot’s comment settles on the pragmatic center of Hulme’s vocabulary nonetheless, juxtaposing the two languages of critical dogma and creative production, reaction and revolution, as Pound had with Cavalcanti, as Hulme had with Sorel and Original Sin. In fact, Eliot’s review is guided less by Sorel than by Hulme’s footnotes. In ironically Eliotic fashion, Hulme uses those notes to unveil what would become the argumentative fulcrum of his late work, suggesting that the thought of Original Sin emerges most powerfully from the sidelong work done by art. When Hulme first published his preface separately in the New Age in 1915, he glossed the notion of Original Sin – ‘the most fundamental division that can possibly be made in the region of thinking about society’ (1915, p. 570) – with an extended reference to the history of modern philosophy, suggesting that with Renaissance humanism the idea had already been abrogated, planting ‘the germ of the disease, that was destined to come out finally in romanticism’. More importantly, he claims, the denial of Original Sin gathers the whole of modern philosophy into a single register, collapsing modernity into the elaboration of a single thought. But Hulme quickly transfers that observation from philosophy to art, arguing ‘that what has passed as the science of aesthetics is only a psychology of classical and Renaissance art. This art forms a unity exactly, as thought since the Renaissance does, and differs from the intense Byzantine art in exactly the same way’. In passing, Hulme thus suggests two arguments of very different scale. The first is predictable enough, echoing Pound’s sense of an epochal threshold and reinforcing the premise that art since the Renaissance symptomatically reflects or replicates a set of unfolding philosophical presuppositions, all clustered around the newly central human form. But the second argument is potentially far more provocative. Having suggested a general parallel between the discourses of philosophy and art, Hulme revokes the presumed equivalence, taking ‘the science of aesthetics’ itself as the anachronistic derivative of a later innovation, a psychological accommodation shaped in retrospect to fit the classical or neoclassical demands of the cultural regime. The very category of art, in other words, opens a tautology. The Byzantine ‘art’ adduced as a counter-example functions as art only when removed from its own enabling presuppositions and resubmitted to the alien logic of aesthetic autonomy, when translated into a logic contradictory

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to its own. Art, Hulme suggests, effectively names little more than a certain historical interlude defined by the ideological presuppositions that attend individual psychology and the cult of beauty, belated romantic expressions in each case of a mutation several centuries old. While such presuppositions may appropriate other cultural forms, casting beyond their circumstances to other historical instances and interludes, they risk the illusion of unity in the process. Tactically, Hulme thus offers two mutually exclusive instances, comparing one aesthetic form to another only to destroy the first equation, ultimately contrasting an aesthetic form to something quite radically different. In order to accommodate the particular forms of a different art, one must systematically unravel the set of assumptions that have created the idea of an aesthetic in the first place. As other forms are recognized as art, art itself becomes less recognizable. When Hulme revised his preface a few months later, he exploited the crack opened by Byzantine art more dramatically to dilate on Original Sin again, reaching out to include other traditions as well: The change of sensibility which has enabled us to appreciate Egyptian, Indian, Byzantine, Polynesian, and Negro work as art and not as archaeology or ethnology, has a double effect. While it demonstrates that what were taken for the necessary principles of æsthetics are merely a psychology of Classical and modern European art, it at the same time suddenly forces us to see the essential unity of this art. In spite of its apparent variety, European art in reality forms a coherent body of work resting on certain presuppositions, of which we become conscious for the first time when we see them denied by other periods of art (cf. the work of Riegl on Byzantine art). One might say that in the same way, an understanding of the religious philosophy which subordinates man (regarded as a part of nature) to certain absolute values – in other words, a realisation of the sense of this dogma – forces us to see that there is a much greater family resemblance between all philosophy since the Renaissance than is ever recognised. The philosophy rests, in reality, on the same presuppositions as the art, and forms a coherent system with it. . . . Humanism thus really contains the germs of the disease that was bound to come to its full evil development in Romanticism. (CW, p. 250)

In this second version, tautology is pushed into full contradiction. The awareness of other traditions (itself a modern effect, produced by imperial expansion and the rise of social sciences) expands the category of art only to decompose it, reincorporating ‘European art’ and ‘philosophy since the Renaissance’ as discrete traditions resting on arguable and potentially obsolete presuppositions. Among the presuppositions and ‘necessary principles of æsthetics’ denied is the autonomy of art itself, the very idea that art might remain transhistorically ungrounded and somehow free of time. Hulme’s usage of art moves on two fronts, shadowing the movement of philosophy at a distance, but also intercutting that movement at the point where philosophy and art intersect, in the modern science of aesthetics. The denial of art’s autonomy offers a mere prelude to the denial of the autonomy of the philosophy of art and all that it metaphysically implies. Pragmatically, Hulme’s footnote remains an anomaly, at best a digression from the substance of Sorel’s text and the political concerns that dominate it. Methodologically, however, it distills Hulme’s aesthetic logic to its distinctive core. The concept of art, stripped of any

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intrinsic theoretical weight, returns as a blockage within other conceptual narratives, as an interruption of philosophy or politics, one of those sharp divisions cherished by Eliot or pauses recalled by Pound. Insistently posed twice over, first as art in some conventional sense and then as something quite different, as the prior vestige of an alien tradition that casts normalized habits of perception into question, the work of art lingers as a philosophical irritant, the foreign speck around which philosophical discourses must be woven to achieve an illusion of social coherence. The ultimate failure to maintain that illusion of coherence provides a retrospective confirmation (‘slight indications’, Hulme claims, ‘of the break-up of this period in art’) of the inadequacy of a system that has just been grasped as an epochal totality for the first time. Implicitly, one last tautology lurks in Hulme’s claim: the very ability to recognize modernity in some totalizing fashion bespeaks the end of the concept and the corollary rise of some new set of blindnesses and limitations yet to be recognized. Hulme’s other significant revision concerns the idea of classicism, now attached not only to modern neoclassical revivals but rather to ancient Greek and Roman forms. In the process of that revision, the antinomic structure that first pitted the Renaissance against the medieval period expands to accommodate a much longer set of forces. Ironically, Hulme accepts the presumed connection or continuity between classical and Renaissance forms, the myth of a long humanist arc or common ‘psychology of Classical and modern European art’ stretching almost indifferently over millennia, in order to make his point. But it is precisely by positing that ideological continuity (a ‘coherent body of work’) that Hulme finds the vehicle to suit his theory of historical interruption. Effectively, Hulme posits the medial status of the Middle Ages – a long pause between classical humanisms – only to question it, to reverse his terms suddenly and suggest that the intervening suspension of classical aesthetic principles constitutes a positive set of presuppositions in its own right. By his own account, it was an encounter with Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna that first spurred Hulme’s attempt to construct a proper metaphysic of art, reinforced by the writings of Paul Ernst, Alois Riegl, and Wilhelm Worringer (CW, p. 271). And it is in the series of footnotes on Original Sin that he begins to reckon the power of that alien tradition, as the negation of classicism and romanticism together. Perhaps more importantly, however, it is in that sequence of marginalia that Hulme finally sheds the language of classicism for that of anti-humanism, for the first time gathering artistic, philosophical, and theological elements into a coherent set of attitudes. The passage that first appeared as an afterthought to Sorel and an attempt to explain Original Sin would, within a few more months, move to the center of Hulme’s last writings, again altered only slightly: In a previous note, I made this assertion: ‘In spite of its extreme diversity, all philosophy since the Renascence is at bottom the same philosophy. The family resemblance is much greater than is generally supposed. The obvious diversity is only that of the various species of the same genus.’ It is very difficult to see this when one is inside this philosophy; but if one looks at it from the standpoint of another philosophy it at once becomes obvious. A parallel may make this clearer. The change of sensibility which has

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enabled us to regard Egyptian, Polynesian, and Negro work, as art and not as archaeology has had a double effect. It has made us realise that what we took to be the necessary principles of æsthetic, constitute in reality only a psychology of Renascence and Classical Art. At the same time, it has made us realise the essential unity of these latter arts. For we see that they both rest on certain common pre-suppositions, of which we only become conscious when we see them denied by other arts. (Cf. the work of Riegl on Byzantine art.) In the same way an understanding of the religious philosophy which preceded the Renascence makes the essential unity of all philosophy since seem at once obvious. It all rests on the same conception of the nature of man, and exhibits the same inability to realise the meaning of the dogma of Original Sin. (CW, pp. 427-8)

With petulant italics, Hulme underscores not only the sort of art needed to demonstrate his thesis, but also the totalizing identity of art with metaphysics (‘the same philosophy’), the narrow character of modern thought (‘essential unity’), the perspective from which that thought becomes estranged (‘when one is inside this philosophy’), and the process of negation that such an art unleashes against such a thought’s most unreflectively held instincts (‘when we see them denied’). More importantly, Hulme begins to formulate the paradox at the core of his aesthetic theory, based on the premise that art occupies time and space differently than other cultural forms, organizing history in durations much longer than those furnished by the subject and its attendant philosophy. What is most important about Byzantine art (or any of Hulme’s other examples, each a functional medievalism/modernism of another sort) is simply the fact that it remains visible even when all of its informing categories and assumptions have lapsed into abeyance. Deprived of its systemic context, the work of art performs a dual function. As art, it entails an alien aesthetic or even metaphysic of art that has gone silent. As something other than art, it persists as a reproach to and refutation of the ideal of continuity, insisting on the radical non-correspondence of historical moments. In this case, the logic of Original Sin has reached its natural end. Having set out to explain the dogma in a footnote, Hulme ends in the same place and with the same figure. Each iteration of the argument rearranges the pieces of the constellation, offering or withdrawing some significant element, but making its way back in the end to the same problem of ‘the meaning of the dogma of Original Sin’. In its simplest version, that problem has to do with the coexistence of incompatible historical logics, woven together under the newly hybridized notions of philosophy and art. But philosophy and art operate differently. If thought is always bound reflexively, perhaps even unconsciously, to its moments and modes of production, art is not. To the contrary, art extends out of its time almost by definition, as an object shorn of its own enabling conditions, a text deprived of its lexicon or the terms of its legibility. In this respect, Hulme’s comparison of art to archaeology is overdetermined: the art that he envisions is a sort of archaeological shard already, an attempt to extrapolate from the available evidence to sketch an epoch whole. The selection of Byzantine art as a favored example thus resituates Hulme’s discourse of medievalism in a distinctive way. Most obviously, it disrupts the progressive structure of a narrative culminating teleologically in modernity, rhetorically unhinging the Middle Ages from their medial status. More importantly, however, the introduction of Byzantine art reverses the relationship between

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medieval and modern, using a distant model of geometric form to induce the shape of a larger system of production. Suggested already in Riegl’s work on the late Roman art industry, with its discovery of a discrete structure of aesthetic intentionality that varies according to historical epoch [Kunstwollen], Hulme’s move sharply distinguishes between a medieval art conceived on its own premises and one filtered through the logic of modernity: ‘beside its negative role of demolition in order to make room for the new, late Roman art always had positive aims, which have to date remained unrecognized, because they appear so different from our accustomed ideas of the aims of modern art’ (Riegl, 1985, p. 12). Within the canons of modern aesthetics, such an art remains frankly ugly, coldly repellent or illegibly dissonant in its refusal of classical conceits of relation and its ignorance of modern habits of arrangement. But according to Riegl’s scheme, Byzantine art dissolves the atomism of classical logic, placing individual objects not in relation to each other but rather in the context of extensive space and ‘mass composition’ (1985, p. 224) In other words, Byzantine figuration dispenses with the individual form, seeking instead to integrate larger impersonal spaces and conceptual matrices within which the subject itself is reduced to negligible significance. Hulme’s idea of the Byzantine thus provides an exemplary rejoinder to the Kantian reduction of art to the subjective and the non-conceptual, and to the postulation through the subject of a universal power of judgment (Kant, 2000, pp. 75-8). Incorporating Worringer’s distinction between empathetic (subjective) and abstract (objective) systems of judgment, it constructs an artistic sphere that not only emphatically refuses the Kantian language of pleasure, but also elides the privileged psychology of the observer (Worringer, 1953). In a strict sense, such an art remains purely objective, both anonymous and impervious to the interpretive demands that the subject imposes. In a far more radical sense, however, such an art outstrips the logic of subject and object together. For Hulme, the association of Byzantine forms with more ancient figurative modes on one side (Egyptian or Indian) and with alternative modernisms on the other (Polynesian or African in origin) also underscores a more ambitious inversion. For in such a scheme, it is precisely the classical or humanist ideal that marks the historical interruption, that constitutes a finite interlude between epochs. It is the Renaissance ideal, that is to say, that comprises the actual dark age, long centuries distinguished by their forgetting of geometric forms and banished only with the rekindling of lost arts. Lurking in Hulme’s turn is an emerging final thesis, an inversion that ultimately postulates the medievality not of the Middle Ages but rather of modernity, of the very epoch in the process of breaking up piece by newly fragmentary piece. Within the almost ridiculous exaggeration of that polemic, however, Hulme conceals a very real and even measured point, one that perhaps ties the otherwise outlandish rhetorics of medievalism and Original Sin together. If works of art constitute the fragmentary evidence of eclipsed historical totalities, if they inhabit time differently by the very fact of their survival into alien epochs removed from their own conditions of production, then art specifies also the material aspect of Original Sin itself, finite and objective ground on which a concept of temporality and a politics of epochality may be constructed with all the suddenness of the enigmatic.

Chapter 11

Hulme’s Feelings Edward P. Comentale

A melancholy spirit, the mind like a great desert lifeless, and the sound of march music in the street, passes like a wave over the desert, unifies it, but then goes. T. E. Hulme, Collected Writings, p. 23

This may be the saddest essay ever written about modernism. Sadness washes over all I have to say, dissolving each truth I hope to claim. Sadness exceeds all sense of personal tragedy – it cannot be contained by Hulme’s demise, by the professional failure and young death of a great thinker. Sadness exceeds all social tragedy and nostalgia – it flows past and then over the once proud monuments of modernism. Yes, this sadness pours forward, silting the appraisable, pushing itself beyond its original cause and towards a different future. This sadness is a productive force, one of the most transportive aspects of modernist writing. It is what at first drives and then routs the modernist polemic, what pushes modern thought and vision beyond the glacial impasse of modernity. Granted, it has taken me some time to recognize this sadness for what it is. I first read Hulme as an adolescent, and as can be expected, I was attracted to anything but his sadness. Almost immediately, my teenage angst found a perfect fit in his weightier modernist angst. Young rage found shape, reason, a goal in his angry prose – the vague lines of selfhood were firmed up by his all-too-male voice. For years, I remained committed to this angry Hulme. I found myself trying out all of his intellectual poses – the more extreme, the better. These allowed me to throw down the gauntlet, again and again, to extend juvenile revolt into an education and then a profession. His emphasis on classical stasis provided a certain resistance to the fast-paced kitsch of modern production. His reactionary politics were a last defense against the liberal marketplace, a necessary check on the violence of consumption and production. His ethics provided the foundation for a most unethical revolt, as one last slap in the face of all that is preached as correct in academia today. Yes, this anger was comforting; I carried it around with me like armor. I had buddied up to a modernist who inspired fear in all other moderns: this bully was my muse. In some ways, I still think this response is an appropriate one. For me, modernism is not simply adolescent, but adolescence itself. In its anger, its moodiness, its beautiful idealism, modernism embodies the dynamics of troubled

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youth and so remains at once alluring, captivating, and absolutely frightening. But sadness is also a part of this emotional mix – its base, so to speak. Peel away the spectacular rage, and you find a wild fear of change and resignation. Peel away this too, and there you see the most profound sense of loss; you find the last glorious vestiges of naiveté withering before the reality of war, trade, exploitation. But beyond personal tragedy or even psychopathology, modernist sadness serves as a way of relating to the world. It is at base a phenomenology, a dynamic that reveals selfhood in relation to its environment and thus establishes a basis for judgment. Hulme’s sadness works like a motor – it hums, it purrs; it carries him through the world and it gets things done. It is a primary production, sensual as well as ethical – it feels its way into matter, towards others, and toward value. Indeed, it was only my own anxious experience of sadness that allowed me to feel Hulme’s. I can pinpoint the moment exactly: I was at a bustling café with a book in my face – Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. I could not have appeared more ridiculously modern, more ridiculously Hulmean, as I realized nothing of the irony of reading this particular book amidst a buzzing, vital crowd. And then, in the middle of Freud’s long equivocation on the superego and guilt, I glanced up at the coffee line to see the face of a colleague. He had been ailing for some time and now his body stood feebly over a white plastic cane. His hair had turned gray and kinky – his face cold and drawn, mouth a jagged sore. Without blinking, I looked down and scrawled ‘I HAVE NO CONSCIENCE’ at the top of the page. I quickly packed up my belongings and scuttled out the back door. Hulme is an embarrassment in many ways, but never so much as when he shows his feelings. Despite his politics (never mind his religion), he seems to irritate us most when he gets emotional. And this is insistent: Hulme consistently writes through feeling, and he only stops when feeling has dried up. Anger, sadness, panic, lust – his work seethes with emotion; each argument, each proof, and every last metaphor begins and ends with a bleeding heart. Bluntly, then, Hulme’s work forces us to consider why emotion in criticism has become so repellent. Indeed, his work can be used to confront head-on the tendency of popular postmodern theories, particularly those that stress the death of the subject, to obscure or at least critique the varied richness of emotional life. Again and again, in his emotional aggression, he proves that all is not discourse, structure, system and that we must not eschew emotion as the last sanctuary of bourgeois sentiment and liberal humanism. After my coffee shop experience, in fact, it became painfully apparent to me that I had no idea what it meant to be sad. Anger was clearly not an appropriate response to the situation, and sympathy seemed so maudlin and self-serving, but I knew nothing of being sad. I began to rethink my interest in modernism and to explore modern literature as it stands by its emotions. I turned to modernism as a last defense of emotionalism and its critical variedness, as a more engaged way of understanding our relation to the world and its potential values. This may seem odd, given that the high modernist tradition itself contains a scathing critique of humanism and common sentiment. Eliot’s theory of depersonalization, Lewis’s cold method of satire, Barnes’s scathing laugh – these artists and their work blasted away at the pillars of bourgeois humanism and

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pushed for a seemingly postmodern attentiveness to physics, discourse, system. They extended the most aggressive tendencies of modern history itself – technologization, taylorization, commodification, mass spectacle – chipping away at the private spaces of the ego, outsourcing vast reservoirs of libido into the sprawling marketplace.1 However, as I soon realized, the modernist demise of the subject does not necessarily presuppose a demise of modernist feeling. Eliot famously described poetry as the ‘expression of significant emotion’ (Eliot, 1975, p. 44) and Pound defined the ‘image’ as an ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’ (Pound, 1935, p. 4). Their modernism could just as easily be read in terms of its preoccupation with primary feeling. Similarly, the taylorized workplace remains a scene of hostility or pride, the city occasions both intense fear and intense hope; feeling persists throughout these structures, if even in a dehumanized, impersonal form. Ultimately, despite our desubjectivized smugness, feeling remains to condition and contain the cultural networks that supposedly signaled its demise. In fact, one might even argue that desubjectivization itself allows feeling, which is always somewhat more than subjective, to enter the socius in a more active away. Ironically, modernity killed off the subject only to free up feeling and its critical potential. We may no longer be subjects, but our emotions still haunt the landscape, at once shaming and shaping its future.2 Two distinctions, then. First, we need to examine the way in which the work of feeling has been absorbed and obscured by modernist psychoanalytic discourse. As I hope to show, feeling is qualitatively different from desire; its physis, its spontaneity, and its plentitude everywhere distinguish it from libido and free it from ego pathology. Feeling may qualify the experience of libidinal cathexis; its various modes seem either to increase or diminish the strictures of pathology. But feeling remains distinct both as an inassimilable quantum of physiognomic energy and as an extra-subjective revelation of value. Feeling, in other words, exceeds desire on two fronts: it is both more spontaneous and more formal than desire, at once overflowing with affect and committed to value. Indeed, as I hope to show, feeling complicates not only our sense of desire, but psychoanalytic discourse itself. Its excesses continually complicate the experience of neurosis and thus drive psychoanalytic theory itself into a certain obsessional tailspin. Second, we must distinguish feeling from more recent accounts of affect. Undoubtedly, feeling is bound to a certain phenomenological affect, but it also consists of an evaluative dimension by which affect can be actualized, qualified, and evaluated. Brian Massumi, for example, draws upon cognitive science and classical phenomenology in order to define parallel, but correlated systems of cognition. Every image-event, he claims, is received on two levels, the discursive and the affective. On the one hand, discourse fixes the quality of the image-event; it qualifies the event in terms of socially inscribed ideals or norms. On the other, affect is experienced in terms of strength and duration; it registers the force of the image-event, its sensual impact. For Massumi, the relationship between these two levels – of qualification and intensity – consists of resonation and interference, amplification and dampening. Cognition occurs on a sliding scale between these extremes: at one end, we experience pure discourse, rational analysis; at the other, pure autonomous affect,

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phenomenological openness; in between, we find a conscious-autonomic mix, a measure of their participation in one another. Indeed, in between, we find emotion, emotion as ‘qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning’ (Massumi, 1995, pp. 86-8). Massumi’s typology is adequate, but his emphasis is not. As a postmodernist, as a Deleuzian, Massumi pins his hopes on affect. Affect is intensity, and intensity is inassimilable. Affect is the virtual, an infinite potential, waiting to be actualized – it is the foundation of an ethical openness to the world. For moderns, though, affect is only the base of experience, an unconscious potential in need of some structure or formal judgment. Hence, they tend to validate emotion – the midpoint of discourse and affect – as the socio-linguistic fixing, or qualification, of an experience. Following the moderns’ lead, I would like to assert the autonomy of emotion as a mode that productively conjoins affect with judgment. Hulme’s feelings move us away from psychology towards phenomenology, but also beyond a simple phenomenology toward ethics. Through feeling, being is reopened to a meaningful network, affectively linked to the construction and reconstruction of social value.3 To begin, then, we should recognize that Hulme’s most intense emotions arise precisely in response to a confusion about the role of emotion in thought. If anger seems to strike a dominant note in his work, its first cause – somewhat tautologically – seems to be his inability to distinguish anger from true thought. Indeed, Hulme tends to write through rage – rage against romantics, against liberals, against pacifists, against women. And, honestly, he is most captivating when hateful, most thrilling in his violence, whether it is directed at Bertrand Russell’s rationalist ethics or the threat of German expansionism (CW, pp. 153, 330ff.). One must marvel at a man who claims he is about to perform a ‘war dance’ on philosophical determinism or who plans to direct ‘a little personal violence’ against a rival art critic (CW, pp. 146, 260). On one level, Hulme’s conflation of thought and feeling is self-serving. He wants to play it both ways; when reason fails, he turns to violence, and when violence is impossible or uncouth, he turns to reason; similarly, he can easily accuse his enemies of being either too rational or too irrational, failing to see the truth of his reason or his passion. Always, for Hulme, anger remains compelling as it comes closest to the oppositional stance of true critique. Anger serves to reinforce an otherwise anxious boundary between intellect and world, shoring up an impossible distinction between the cultural critic and his culture. Indeed, even at his most cantankerous, he finds room to confess that extremism alone makes his thought appear tangible and concrete; he remarks that the most powerful thinker is one who can tangibly mark himself off from others, that all intellectual work must start with a set of people who are prepared to fight for their position (CW, pp. 131, 60). At base, though, Hulme is deeply troubled by this epistemological muddle. If anything, his loud wrath serves to purify his responses, to drown out the realization that his most rigorous ideas are simply ideological, or that what he thinks is ideology in others has a respectable intellectual basis (CW, p. 145). His greatest frustration arises in response to the

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recognition that, among moderns, any kind of debate has become impossible. It corresponds to his recognition that the hybridity of thought both reinforces and denies the possibility of conclusiveness, at once erects and erases its own rhetoric. Ultimately, relativistic tensions, which once seemed to suggest the possibility of epistemological clearness, now only lead to a hopeless stalemate. In these instances, Hulme’s ‘annoyance demands physical expression’; in his impotent rage, he wants ‘to do something dramatic with the printed page’ (CW, p. 153). Importantly, then, Hulme’s anger is always an aftereffect, a defensive pose in response to a fearful state of epistemological turmoil. Anger is the default mode for something much less stable, much less assured or comforting; it is an adolescent lashing out at a change or confusion that is otherwise beyond his control. In contrast, the less spectacular, but no less definitive tone of Hulme’s work is sadness, if not outright grief. For Hulme, sadness is experienced prior to any kind of anger: it is his first and most basic response to the relativity of thought and the existential ash-heap of modernity. As he describes it, sadness is no aftereffect, but an absolute condition. It is as primary as ‘the breaking up into cinders’, as immediate as the ‘essentially imperfect, chaotic, and cinder-like’ de-composition of the modern world (CW, p. 9). For Hulme, there are only two moods in life: one heroic and the other tragic. He is either ‘flying along in the wind’, ‘constructing a new theory’, or ‘Ill in bed, toothache, W.C. in the Atlantic’. The first is thrilling, stable, and impersonal, the latter is debilitating, uncontrollable, and entangled: ‘The sick disgusting moments are part of the fundamental cinders – primeval chaos – the dream of impossible chaos’. Granted, both of these moods are personal, subjective, but they entail two different kinds of phenomenology, and, in Hulme’s more honest moments, only the latter bears witness to the abject truth of his situation: ‘Ennui and disgust, the sick moments – not an occasional lapse or disease, but the fundamental ennui and chaos out of which the world has been built’ (CW, p. 13). Most importantly, Hulme’s sadness seems to shut down, or short-circuit, any current line of argument. At the moment of sadness, production ceases; modernism, and particularly its critical anger, is put on hold. Yet, at the same time, these impasses are only temporary. Hulme’s sadness tends to propel his arguments beyond themselves in an entirely different register. After the last line quoted above, Hulme breaks off his paragraph and then offers a radically different definition of the subject as a kind of sorting machine ceaselessly rearranging the objects of his world (CW, p. 13). For me, this sadness – as it is defined by a dynamic of stasis and change – is central to modern emotional life. It is the fulcrum by which the most forward-thinking modernist texts move (Ford’s The Good Soldier, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; Pound’s Pisan Cantos, to name a few) and the basis by which modernism begins to deconstruct itself and the humanist tradition out of which it arose. This dynamic is most clearly on display in Hulme’s fraught account of his response to the work of philosopher Henri Bergson and the thoroughly modernist phenomenon of popular Bergsonisme. Hulme, as always, begins with a personal confession, describing the ‘great excitement’, ‘the physical delight of freedom’ that he felt when he first encountered Bergson’s work. He describes his initially

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overwhelming fascination with both the content and shape of Bergson’s thought – the ‘physical sensation’ of expansion he felt during his first reading, as if the turmoil of his own cramped mind found a new spacious abode and comfort in Bergson’s semi-abstract system. As Hulme confesses, this ‘release’ – at once ‘satisfying’ and ‘comforting’ – could hardly be described as intellectual (CW, pp. 126-8). In fact, he repeatedly apologizes for his enthusiasm, which he says springs from ‘mental debility’ (CW, p. 128), and he insists, again and again, that he will soon provide a more sober account. He also asserts his desire to distance himself from other followers of the Bergson craze, who have no true understanding of philosophy and are simply ‘driven on the beliefs of this kind by a certain appetite, a certain craving, which must be satisfied’ (CW, p. 129). As he explains, this craving is decisively modernist, since it fetishizes the ‘new’ and ‘different’: ‘It is an unconscious process; it most generally takes the form of a belief that the future holds possibilities of the perfect which have been denied to the present and the past. This type of debility of mind finds sanity in the belief that it is on the verge of great happenings’ (CW, p. 130). But with these apologies Hulme places himself in a very difficult bind. He has invalidated both his own intuitive response as well as the possibility of any rational vantage point. He traps himself between the mass of sentiment and the falseness of intellectual detachment, mired in his own binary as well as unable to reconcile its terms. The utterly modernist dimension of this position becomes apparent when Hulme next attends one of Bergson’s lectures. After some difficulty attaining a pass, he arrives at the hall to discover a crowd of women ‘with their heads lifted up in a kind of “Eager Heart” attitude, which resembles nothing so much as the attitude of my kitten when gently waking up from a nap’ (CW, p. 154). Apparently, with this single vision, Hulme’s ‘fixed and solid’ belief in Bergson is immediately tossed into doubt. The spectacle of sentimental consumption at once obliterates his defensive intellectual armor: ‘My mind began at once, almost unconsciously, to feel that what these people thought about Bergson was entirely wrong. More than that, I passed on to the further belief that Bergson himself was wrong. The whole structure of beliefs so carefully constructed fell down like a house of cards. . . . What these people agreed upon could not be right. It is not in the nature of truth to be grasped so easily or so enthusiastically’ (CW, p. 156). The crisis of modernist epistemology is apparent here in the confusion of emotion and vision as well as in the fraught relation between individual and mass. Yet what also interests us is that, for Hulme, anger no longer appears as a viable response, or, at the very least, an appropriate one. The feminine image here inspires a reaction that is still in part ‘disgust’, but is mostly ‘depression’. Hulme feels as if he had been ‘struck down by a most profound fit of depression’, ‘a most remarkable fit of the profoundest and blackest scepticism’. He mounts a halfhearted campaign to reassert the boundary between himself and the mass, between intellect and affect, but he has lost the will to do so: the spectacle was ‘profoundly depressing, not so much because it destroyed a particular set of fixed beliefs, but because it destroyed, so it seemed to me, the possibility of any “fixed” belief whatever’ (CW, p.156).

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Importantly, though, while this scene marks the waning of Hulme’s interest in Bergson, it also signals the beginning of his most sustained effort to define the relationship between thought and feeling. His work soon reveals a new vigor, a new eagerness, as if the unrelieved potential of his affective experience gropes around frantically looking for new forms – a new discourse – through which to express itself. Certainly, even in Hulme’s early notebooks, we find inchoate expressions of a budding emotional phenomenology. Again and again, he rejects a stoic ‘armchair philosophy’ and ventures forth into the busy street, the crowded bus, and the bustling café. He experiments with his emotions, allowing each in turn to be occasioned by the phenomena of the urban landscape: repugnance rises towards this painting, disgust with that baby; sadness comes from that crowd over there. Apparently harmless objects – a museum dome, a gate railing, for instance – depress him. Even certain textures give rise to sentiment: ‘Smoothness. Hate it’ (CW, p. 22). Importantly, though, Hulme’s emotional life is decisively depersonalized and the objects that spark emotion are never metaphorized. He resolutely attempts to feel beyond, or maybe before, ego psychology and the structures of desire: the cinder must be felt in ‘a religious way’ and thus become ‘a criterion for nearly all judgment, philosophic and aesthetic’ (CW, p. 21). Hulme, in fact, desires a ‘space consciousness’, a sort of heightened experience of phenomenal space. He wants to ground being in its environment, splay it out into the phenomenal world and its impersonal order: ‘The idealists analyse space into a mode of arranging sensations. But this gives us an unimaginable world existing all at a point. Why not try to reverse the process and put all ideas (purely mental states) into terms of space (cf. landscape thinking)?’ (CW, p. 19). After his Bergson experience, however, Hulme more explicitly seeks to clarify the merging of reason, psychology, emotion, and affect. Indeed, this intentional muddle is precisely what makes his later work so interesting: his multidimensional phenomenology opens up the binaries of classical modernism (subject/object; thought/feeling) as well as the categories by which we perpetuate those binaries (hot/cold; fascist/democratic). Truth here is neither immediately discovered nor spontaneously created; it exists only in an affective tension, in the networked energy of the past, the personal, the objective, and the intellectual. Take, for example, Hulme’s emphasis on touch. He turns repeatedly to touching as it blurs the boundary not only between subject and object, but also between thought, emotion, and physical sensation. Tangibility entails both the comfort of subjective coherence as well as the anxious revelation of difference; it allows the possible recognition of stable values and the sensation of a certain inassimilable affect. His earliest collection of notes, ‘Cinders’, was originally conceived as a modern parable. The fictional Aphra served as a poet-hero whose power lay solely in his ability to touch. As Hulme explains, ‘There are moments when the tip of one’s finger seems raw. In the contact of it and the world there seems a strange difference. The spirit lives on that tip and is thrown on the rough cinders of the world. All philosophy depends on that – the state of the tip of the finger. . . . When Aphra had touched, even lightly, the rough wood, this wood seemed to cling to his finger, to draw itself backward and forward along it. The spirit returned again and

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again, as though fascinated, to the luxurious torture of the finger’ (CW, p. 18). Here, subject and object are inextricably conjoined at the point of contact. Spirit and matter coexist at the fingertip, in a state of ‘luxurious torture’. Hulme, like Aphra, returns to the point of contact because there he finds both unity and difference, power as well as release. With each touch, he finds his body open to the world, subject to manifold sensations and potentialities, and he finds that world subject to his own meanings and demands, submissive to human decision.4 Certainly, we can explain this phenomenon through psychoanalysis and turn Aphra into Oedipus. As we will find, though, Freud’s terms fails to contain either the affective dimension or the ethical dimension of this phenomenon. Hulme does not work through the phallus, or even the ego; rather, he mediates desire in an antisymbolic, experiential way and thus suggests the possibility of a life that is at once more open and more ethical. Hulme’s most gratifying defense of this phenomenological method and its ethical dimension appears in his war writings, where he wrestles with the opposed attitudes of pacifists, warmongers, nationalists, rebels, suffragettes, Germans, Brits, and the Irish. His ‘A Notebook’, for example, was written directly in response to the hot moral and political confusion that arose over the war. Tellingly, he presents his essay as an attempt to clear up the maddening conflation of subjective biases and absolute truths, between relative, accidental positions (of, say, the pacifists) and objective arguments (of, say, his own essays). Indeed, the entire ‘Notebook’, its strength and weakness alike, rests upon a willful dissociation and re-correlation of attitudes, beliefs, truths, and values. Hulme argues that the apparently logical arguments of his opponents are entirely sentimental, and he insists that his own sentiment, while personal and subjective, is objectively ‘correct’ and ‘true’. He begins, then, by describing the emotions he experienced while sitting in a museum and reading through the back numbers of a philosophical review. With each issue, he finds himself increasingly overwhelmed by how quickly seemingly important ideas are overturned: ‘When the last ounce of solidity seemed thus to melt away in the universal deliquescence, the thing become a horror, and I had to rescue myself. I drew up a list of antitheses, of perpetual subjects of dispute, on each of which I had convictions, based on a brutal act of assertion, which no argument could touch’ (CW, p. 421). This emotionalism persists throughout the piece, haunting all his efforts to distinguish the absolute and the fallen, the animal and the human, the religious and the material. Seemingly without irony, he admits that while most philosophy seems impersonal and exact, it is often only an apparently logical description of an utterly personal attitude. Implicating his own writing, he argues that philosophy is not ‘a pure but a mixed subject. It results from a confusion between two subjects which stand in essential relation to each other, though they may be combined together for a certain practical reason’ (CW, p. 428). With this, though, Hulme is forced to call his own bluff. He admits that his own spiritual absolutism is nothing more than an attitude. His ethics are simply the result of a certain appetite – an historical accident, really – contained to just himself and a few of his radical modern peers. However, he insists that, as opposed to the humanist or relativist attitude, the religious attitude is

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a ‘right attitude’. As he claims, ‘I am so far from such scepticism about the matter, that I regard difference between the two attitudes as simply the difference between true and false’ (CW, p. 448). Hulme’s effort to resolve this paradox is founded upon his affective phenomenology. His proof is based on certain sensations of satisfaction and dissatisfaction – anger, remorse, love – and its success depends upon an ability to translate intuitive, affective responses into appropriate dogma. In all intellectual matters, he argues, it is the satisfactoriness of conclusions that need to be tested. The true is the satisfying and the satisfying is true – the reality of any value is at once felt, asserted, and recognized in the emotional register: ‘It should be noticed’, he argues, ‘that these canons of satisfaction are quite unconscious’ (CW, p. 429). We will soon consider Hulme’s sense of tragic sadness as essential to this late method. First, however, we need to look closely at the work of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler, who served Hulme as a model for this kind of emotional investigation.5 For Scheler, feeling lies at the origins of all non-formal ethics as the means by which the world and its values are made apparent. Feeling reveals essences and values immediately, in feeling itself, as they exist apart from psychology as well as philosophy. Whether the attraction of love or the repulsion of hate, feeling does not precede, but enact all doing, choosing, and willing; feeling is how human being takes part, and through which alone human being can take part. Love and hate are the original moments by which all value and its possible fulfillment are made apparent: ‘every kind of intellectual comprehension of whatness of an object presupposes an emotional experience of value related to this object. The proposition holds true for the simplest perception as well as for remembering, expecting, and finally, also for all types of thinking.’6 This language might be difficult for us to swallow today, but Scheler’s genius is his ability to feel his way outside of the categories that condition contemporary thinking. For Scheler, feeling is both more than the subject and more than his world; it everywhere exceeds the structures of the psyche and sees beyond the practical demands of a specific environment. Feeling is an apprehension that immediately takes the self out of the self as it comprehends an autonomous realm of values. It is a fundamental and spontaneous act that cannot be reduced to any local phenomenon. In fact, precisely because it is a spontaneous act it attains the quality of the absolute, at once recognizes and establishes the absolute. ‘The fact that one value is “higher” than another is apprehended in a special act of value cognition: the act of preferring . . . the height of the value is “given”, by virtue of its essence, only in the act of preferring. Whenever this is denied, one falsely equates the preferring with “choosing” in general, i.e. an act of conation. Without doubt, choosing must be grounded in the cognition of a higher value, for we choose that purpose among others which has its foundation in a higher value. But “preferring” occurs in the absence of all conation, choosing, and willing. For instance, we can say, “I prefer roses to carnations”, without thinking of a choice. All choice takes place between the deeds’ (Scheler, 1992, p. 221). Thus, Scheler presents ethics as radically personal and yet radically idealistic. Man’s own heart can either confirm or deny a supreme order of values – he knows

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it as he is ready to make it real. Indeed, for Scheler, love reveals values as they exist apart from any subject or any object. It is directed solely at the value of which any object might be a bearer and thus persists despite any changes in the object. Hate, conversely, is a rejection of higher value, a refusal to acknowledge or an incapacity to recognize that value. It is ‘in the strictest sense destructive, since it does in fact destroy the higher values (within these spheres) and has the additional effect of blunting and blinding our feeling for such values and power of discriminating them’ (Scheler, 1992, p. 75). Ultimately, Hulme and Scheler describe an ethical system that is neither simply contractual nor stupidly fortuitous, but, rather, both more relative and more absolute. In a single emotive act, feeling and value coalesce, realizing each other through each other; at the same time, in the same act, an absolute discontinuity is generated, a radical division between the world of subjective passions and a world of essential values. In other words, the emotional act asserts radical hybridity as well as absolute difference, and thus – as I hope to show – enacts what Bruno Latour has defined as a ‘productive network’. Emotion’s power and critical import lies primarily in its refusal to reduce or divide phenomena into purely material or purely spiritual truth, into simple bodily necessity or abstract human freedom; instead, it confronts material history as it both defines and discovers competing values; it effects a quasi-cybernetic conjunction between the objects of natural science, cultural science, and ethics itself. But let us leave this caring, feeling modernism alone for a moment. Let us consider modernism without sadness, in its anger and hostility, in its paranoid work of projection and introjection. As I have already noted, Hulme’s work can easily be defined as a kind of adolescence. At his best and most creative, his writing displays a boyish playfulness, a charming sense of discovery, and a sincere quest for intellectual exchange. A reader easily imagines Hulme toying with one of his many stray kittens, debating political ideologies with strangers in Hyde Park, or walking along Oxford Street for miles to prove that it really leads to Oxford. At its worst, though, Hulme’s adolescent bent takes form as sullen rage, angry idealism, and complete horror of the human body. His immaturity is apparent in his selfconscious and self-damning ambivalence, a violent hatred of authority that is matched only by an equally violent disgust with disorder. Hulme, indeed, adopts one father after another, at first championing and then mimicking and finally betraying each one in turn (Nietzsche, Bergson, Worringer, Lasserre, etc.). His avowed disgust with the body cannot be divorced from his absolute fear of all things feminine: women appear in his writing in mocking and often freakish poses, dancing in the mud, hiding behind bushes, tittering in the street (CW, pp. 12-13, 32). Certainly, Hulme’s intellectual turmoil is psychosexual, and we would learn much by reading his work through a psychosexual lens. His main intellectual dilemmas revolve around the nature of (male) selfhood as it remains caught between conscience and desire, between an impossible law and a precarious instinct. His mind spins madly around his own body, seeking solace in either its finitude or its freedom, but never able to settle for either closure or exposure. Here we perhaps find the root of his anger and paranoia; rage serves to construct and

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control the anxious borders between self and self-as-other. Indeed, the angry adolescent can imagine order and chaos, essence and artifice, nature and nurture, but he cannot fathom anything in between; he cannot, in other words, imagine the human – for Hulme, the self is nothing more than a ‘sticky ore’ torn apart by warring instincts, a grotesque homunculus that must be groomed and disciplined into something decent: ‘The future condition of man, then, will always be one of struggle and limitation. The best results can only be got out of man as the result of a certain discipline which introduces order into this internal anarchy’ (CW, p. 235).7 All of the above easily leads to the common psychoanalytical critique of masculine modernism and its attendant cult of heroic values, discursive armoring, and rigid oppositional logic. But, as I hope to show, this critical formulation – which has become so common in modernist studies – only begs the issue, for it remains caught within the same dualistic logic it seeks to oppose. Indeed, the very method for analyzing this problem is also part of the problem, if not its central cause; psychology as we know it is always modern bourgeois psychology, and thus – with its faith in self expression, constitutive experience, and social evolution – remains unable to confront the more dubious aspects of its own political and economic legacy. Thus, just briefly, I would like to take psychoanalysis in terms of its own negation, in its failure to contain modernity in its apparently universal dialectics. Freud must be read in terms of his failure to take account of nonsubjective feeling and thus in terms of how his work throws that feeling into stark relief. For instance, Freud’s touchstones on psychology and ethics, such as Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, can be read as attempts to patch over the increasingly obvious faultlines of his own theory of the ego. Despite his best efforts to re-inter conscience (by way of Oedipus), he repeatedly runs up against a much more complex formulation of the emotional self and its relationship to the social. He replays Hulme’s phenomenological confusion (of thought, emotion, and affect) and thus confronts a definition of the ego as an obsessional entity ceaselessly managing the intensive phenomena of its environment. In fact, by pairing Hulme and Freud, we are able to see the extent to which the latter’s work confronts a specifically modern psychology given over to experiences marked by an excess of affect. Like Hulme’s, Freud’s analysis is wracked with fear concerning the modern world and its increasingly errant forms of affect, and it seems to register these changes in an increasingly anxious way. It awkwardly reframes nonsubjective emotion within the logic of Oedipus and all too quickly effaces those dimensions of modern life that have become less ‘moral’ and more ‘taboo’. Indeed, the most awkward dimensions of this work on the ego – its ceaseless revisioning, its obsession with tangibility, its refusal to countenance the significance of brothers, its mocking descriptions of taboo culture – suggest that psychoanalytic theory serves not to diagnose, but to manage the changing terms of the modern socius. In Totem and Taboo, in fact, Freud begins his defense of humanist psychology and its attendant ethics with a rather mocking description of primitive animism. Everywhere, the internalized guilt of the modern subject is held up against

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animism as a quasi-psychological system caught dubiously between romantic omnipotence and materialist contingency. For Freud, primitive animism entails faulty acts of projection, a non-scientific confusion of what one wants to be true and what is available to sustain that truth. Belief is at once established and reinforced by mostly false associations between fantasy and its objects; it mistakes – in theory and in practice – the realm of desire for the tangible order of things. As sorcery, for example, animism treats the entire world as if it were composed of other psychic forces, and it tries to control those forces by affective means (appeasement, propitiation, intimidation, etc.). As magic, it depends on certain ritualized procedures, such as making an effigy or engaging in mimetic performance (Freud, 1950, p. 104). But in Freud’s characterization, animism also begins to appear as an affective, embedded practice, a system of thought that is healthily restricted by the local. It begins with the advance of libido, a spontaneous projection of the possible, that just as immediately finds either expression or denial in the objects of its environment. The animistic subject reads his needs into the overdetermined structures of his environment; he projects his feelings out into a world that he simultaneously transforms (Freud, 1950, pp. 81, 120-1). Thus, despite Freud’s smugness, animism in general figures as an affective way of reading that is attuned to the network as a whole: its psychic dimensions and its material restraints, its human requirements and worldly demands. In other words, animism is exemplified by Hulme’s own method, which is best characterized not simply as a neurotic condition, but as a productive disorder. Freud fears, but Hulme ultimately accepts, that modern society is totemic society in its all too rigorous conflation of the symbolic with the productive. Indeed, its signifying practices are its productive practices (Freud, 1950, pp. 39-40). Freud’s formulation of animism, in fact, directly recalls Hulme’s own emphasis on touch and the phenomenological confusion that surrounds touching. In Totem and Taboo, touching figures among primitive cultures as an almost spontaneous creation and negotiation of value – affect, desire, and social proscription conjoin in a moment that at once short-circuits and reconstitutes the network as a whole (Freud, 1950, p. 35). However, Freud quickly shuts down his discovery of this conscious-autonomic mix and its relation to the socius at large. Indeed, psychoanalysis, with its attendant ideological pressures, emerges in Totem and Taboo as a way of repressing, or at least managing, the messy contingency of the social network. For Freud, taboo culture is simply a primitive form of guilt culture: it represents a pre-humanist, quasi-psychological system of thought and ethics that inevitably (and thankfully) gave way to the more secure (because less tangible) regime of the internalized superego. Thus, for Freud, touching phobias, like any other obsessive-compulsive disorder, suggest that a prohibition has been internalized alongside an original desire (Freud, 1950, p. 39). The desire to touch figures as the first step towards instinctual mastery or appropriation, but it has been effectively barred from its object by the superego. Importantly, Freud argues that taboos of any kind are prohibitions that have been pressed upon one generation by the previous one. The prohibition against touching is simply one of many proscriptions handed down from patriarch to son, at once exposing as it attempts to

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deflect the real issue at hand: the potential for Oedipal revolt. Indeed, it is upon the apparently simple fear of social touching that Freud builds his theory of the primal horde and the intergenerational sacrifice necessary to all culture. The ritual killing is a gesture that allows one to express conflicting desires, both to kill and to be the father. More precisely, it allows one to be the father in his dual aspect, in his license and in his restraint; it is at once a release from all authority and a restriction by way of authority, a transgression and a restoration. As I have suggested, Freud’s mythic narrative responds to an utterly modern phenomenon. His theory provides a symbolic check on a decisively anti-discursive tendency – he is calling on ancient patriarchy in order to contain the incredibly anti-psychological terms of modern fraternalism. His careful delineation between sexual instincts and social instincts, between pleasure principle and reality principle does little to obscure the fact that he confronts a world teeming with obsessive-compulsives, men and women engaged in the ‘luxurious torture’ of fondling each other and the objects of their environment. Ultimately, it seems as if Freud’s writing here confronts the obsessional neuroses only because they themselves seem to arise, dangerously, in response to an uncontrollable upsurge of affect. Indeed, his writing at this time itself figures as a kind of obsessional neurosis, an apparently endless effort to manage the affective surcharges of the modern psyche and thus the gaps in his own theory. The irresolvable dimensions of phenomenological exchange are at once channeled into appropriate forms of transgression (Oedipal rage, incest, etc.) and given a stable place within the theory as a whole (id, death drive, etc.). Ultimately, the energized relations of the spatial network are cast into the linear dimensions of intergenerational time, where they become at once impossible and inconceivable. Conscience is locked into family drama, where it can be nothing but a private mechanism of repression and a familiar reenactment of the law. We might say, of course, that Freud invents Oedipus for an age in which Oedipus no longer functions. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have argued, his work exemplifies a much larger ideological effort to lock modernity back into the family trinity, to stymie the phenomenological schizophrenia of a post-capitalist socius.8 His temporal allegory of fathers and sons carefully delimits what is rather a fascinating spatial dynamic between brothers – the formal perfection of his theory serves to channel the potentially rebellious feelings amongst radical equals. Ultimately, Freud remains caught between a dying bourgeois ideal of a seemingly bounded subjectivity and a sense of self that is at once more affectively open and attuned to an evolving socius. His work tries to contain a modern ego that has already undergone a process of deterioration and thus remains only partially open to alternative configurations of feeling and experience. Indeed, it is precisely because this formulation remains incomplete, inadequate, and neurotic that it suggests we need to pay attention to the power of feeling. This last point brings us to the most significant dimension of feeling in criticism, namely, the different ways in which feeling can be used to shape, increase, and extend the forces of production. In other words, in addition to understanding feeling as an epistemological mode, as it occasions a revelation of

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value, it is also essential to consider feeling insofar as it serves to realize value, to create as it considers a more or less ethical world. I have defined Hulme’s feelings as radically hybrid as well as utterly discontinuous. If anything, it is not his thought or even his rhetoric, but his feelings that underlie his ability to enact all sorts of phenomenal breaks and linkages. On one level, Hulme’s feelings serve to create temporal and spatial breaks, sustaining essentialized differences between, say, the divine and the worldly, the human and the non-human, the romantic and the classical. Indeed, his disgust turns discontinuity into a first article of intellectual and spiritual faith, opposed to the romantic slither of the modern world: ‘We constantly tend to think that the discontinuities in nature are only apparent, and that a fuller investigation would reveal the underlying continuity. This shrinking from a gap or jump in nature has developed to a degree which paralyses any objective perception, and prejudices our seeing things as they really are’ (CW, p. 423). And yet, on another level altogether, Hulme’s emotionalism consistently blurs the distinctions between these realms. His is a particularly modernist tendency toward categorical confusion. It turns science into a religion, it makes judgments in art tantamount to judgments in politics, it confuses a brute primitivism with a mechano-modernism. ‘Mind and Matter’, he exclaims, ‘To take one or the other as absolute is to perpetrate the same old counter fallacy; both are mixed up in a cindery way and we extract them as counters’ (CW, p. 17). Beliefs are founded upon ‘appetite’, but they are also only manipulative ‘representations’, and yet their efficacy and inevitability could be determined by the laws of science (CW, pp. 136, 230). These statements are not simply contradictory or even dialectical. Hulme’s essays continually feel their way into and out of abstraction – the thrust of emotion itself at once raises and confounds the possibility of purity. Despite his claims, he feels chaos as a constant and relativity as an absolute. He celebrates the fallen perspective of man with a sensation akin to the divine. As he ultimately remarks: ‘For an objective view of reality we must make use both of the categories of continuity and discontinuity’ (CW, p. 423). Our perspective must encompass the absolutes of science and divinity as well as the ‘muddy mixed zone’ of the human that lies between the two (CW, p. 425). Bruno Latour’s work on the ‘Modern Constitution’ provides the most compelling account of this double perspective and its productive effects. Latour defines modernity as a correlation of two practices that must remain distinct in order to be effective: the conceptual purification of humans and nonhumans and the phenomenological hybridization of nature and culture. His work depicts a closed system whereby the oppositional stance of modernity, with its assured divisions and persistent binaries, serves only to mask its true work of translation, its production of hybrid networks and quasi-objects. Moderns, he argues, insist on absolute distinctions in order to justify and mobilize more subtle and productive hybrids. They depend upon willfully absolute categories in order to extend formations that exist somewhere between culture and biology, or, say, between religion and science. These purities at once provide the pleasing terms whereby any kind of production becomes acceptable (‘it’s only natural!’ or ‘it’s only

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human!’), while they also obscure that utterly hybrid production and its often questionable aims (‘this is purely natural!’ or ‘this is utterly human!’): Because it believes in the total separation of humans and nonhumans, and because it simultaneously cancels out this separation, the [Modern] Constitution has made the moderns invincible. If you criticize them that Nature is a world constructed by human hands, they will show you that it is transcendent, that science is a mere intermediary allowing access to Nature, and that they keep their hands off. If you tell them that we are free and that our destiny is in our own hands, they will tell you that society is transcendent and its laws infinitely surpass us. . . . If you believe them and direct your attention elsewhere, they will take advantage of this to transfer thousands of objects from nature into the social body while procuring for this body the solidity of natural things. . . . Everything happens in the middle, everything passes between the two, everything happens by way of mediation, translation, and networks, but this space does not exist, it has no place. (Latour, 1993, p. 37)

Latour’s work, though, interests us here for its critical perspective as well as for its sense of a solution. While it exposes the self-sustaining discourses of productive modernity, it seeks resolution in the correlation of formal and affective practices. Latour makes clear that the violence of modernity depends on its refusal to conceive of anything beyond its own rhetoric of purity. First and foremost, then, he asks us to consider the two practices of purification and hybridization together; we must at once expose these two processes as one, slow them down so that they can be evaluated, and then ‘reorient and regulate the proliferation of monsters’ (Latour, 1993, p. 12). Latour, in fact, argues that every society is always already engaged in both of these processes. Quite simply, primitive cultures, by more carefully devoting themselves to the conception of hybrids, are able to manage their proliferation. Conversely, the moderns’ obscene insistence on purification allows its productive capacity to grow at an exorbitant rate, without conscience or even consideration. Between them, non-moderns must maintain and coordinate both practices – they must continue the work of purification as it drives all great production, but they must also cultivate responsible relations to the hybrids that define the network as a whole (Latour, 1993, pp. 134, 140). Most importantly, Latour insists that this appropriately double vision requires two different registers. While he calls for representation and solid critical work, he also alludes to a certain affective engagement by which we must feel our way through the local network. Society, he insists, needs to temper its absolutes with a more ethical recognition of the collective mediator, the network of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. It needs to redirect its attention away from pure forms, from satisfying abstractions, and reconsider the ‘original event’, the hybrid process that ‘creates what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role’ (Latour, 1993, p. 78). In other words, Latour asks us to go down where the monsters live, where the mixtures are made, to re-experience the experience whereby human and nonhuman are both created at once. He asks us to give up righteous indignation for a more active and generous process that follows the ‘countless meanderings of situations and networks’ (Latour, 1993, p. 45). Justice, here, exists only in hybrid

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things, in the utterly anthropological creations that co-organize God, will, love, hatred, and matter. Justice exists in the collective, the continual push and pull of communal affect in relation to the objects of its environment, in the slow accumulation and evolution of the subject–object continuum. Justice is the emotional network, the local configuration of spirit and matter that must be reconstituted at every site and at every moment in order to exist at all. Everything must be reconceived as it exists in its emotional delegation, in its passing, as it is delegated and as it passes. Latour comes closest to defining the value of the emotional terrain that I have been stumbling towards. Indeed, his theory of the affective network pushes us far beyond Hulme’s particular emotionalism toward the full panoply of productive feeling that defines the best modernist experimentation: the affective streams of consciousness in Woolf and Joyce, the precise energistic configurations of the Imagist poem or the affective repetitions of Stein’s Cubist verse, the excesses of sentiment that we see negotiated in the late modernism of West, Barnes, and Lewis. In these last few pages, though, I want to defend sadness specifically as the first principle and cause of all such experimentation, as the most radical way by which modernism may move beyond itself. I would like to defend sadness as the primary emotion capable of pushing us beyond the polemics of purity, as a kind of feeling that is at once critical as well as immanent, capable of judgment as well as generosity, if not simple compassion. For this, we can turn to Hulme’s formulation of Original Sin as it provides the most concise definition of sadness and its productive potential. Original Sin, in fact, lies behind all of Hulme’s work. It readily served him, as it did many pre-war moderns, as a kind of rhetorical shorthand for his radical anti-humanist pessimism, for his belief in the fallibility and instinctual corruption of the subject and society.9 Hulme’s earliest set of notes, for example, describes a fallen, imperfect landscape, out of which certain useful forms and illusions may emerge, but only to sink back into chaos. ‘The eyes, the beauty of the world, have been organized out of the faeces. Man returns to dust. So does the face of the world to primeval cinders. . . . The girl’s ball-dress and shoes are symbolic of the world organized (in counters) from the mud. Separate from contact’ (CW, p. 12). We also find this theory at the base of Hulme’s aesthetics. He celebrates the classical poet for remaining aware of this limit and the ultimate fallibility of man: for the classicist, ‘even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas’ (CW, p 62). And, of course, this pessimism also inspires Hulme’s Tory politics and his defense of religious dogma: ‘In the light of these absolute values, man himself is judged to be essentially limited and imperfect. He is endowed with Original Sin. While he can occasionally accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he can never himself be perfect. . . . As man is essentially bad, he can only accomplish anything of value by discipline – ethical and political’ (CW, p. 444).

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Each of these formulations is founded upon a severe sense of tragedy – the dominant note throughout is a morose sadness. All of Hulme’s intellectual work is riddled with this deep melancholy, a dejection that is at once personal, social, and historical. The concept of Original Sin, however, can also be understood as the most productive aspect of his writing. Indeed, Original Sin is the initial thrust behind his late existential turn and his famous defense of a ‘justice’ that asserts the ‘equality of men’ (CW, p. 251). It can be read between the lines of his sympathetic account of Scheler’s treatise on German militarism and of his attempt to understand the causes behind the larger German war effort (CW, pp. 335-6). Most importantly, it reinforces his heroic efforts to save Epstein and his work from a brutal war machine; he claimed to be ‘fearfully revolted’ by Epstein’s potential death – ‘the thing is really tragic’ (Ferguson, 2002, pp. 260-1). In other words, in Hulme’s best work, what Latour might describe as his ‘non-modern’ work, Original Sin functions as a viable critical stance. It represents the critical betweenness of mankind after the fall, caught between a recognizable paradise and an unbearable necessity. It signals a tragic-heroic condition, a persistent recognition of higher values, but also an inevitable failure to attain them. Indeed, as a conceptual category, Original Sin is defined primarily by negations – the human is not divine, but neither is the human purely animal. It locates the thinker both above and below the body, as well as decisively within the body. It allows us to posit an absolute discontinuity between the ideal and the worldly as well as to confirm the utter conflation of the two. It grants us, in Hulme’s words, access to the three regions of reality: ‘Imagine these three regions’, he claims, ‘as the three zones marked out on a flat surface by two concentric circles. The outer zone is the world of physics, the inner that of religion and ethics, the intermediate one that of life’ (CW, p. 424). The intermediate region of life is’, he explains, ‘essentially relative’, so a ‘muddy mixed zone then lies between the two absolutes’ (CW, pp. 424-5).10 Hulme’s writings thus give a critical shape to sadness, an affective structure upon which an entirely new Weltanschauung might be based. He turns sadness into a firm epistemological basis, before reason and beyond psychology, neither a posited formalism nor a blind process of identification. Indeed, once the hot confusion of the ego lifts, Hulme’s emotional sphere attains a certain autonomy and a clear critical basis. Through sadness, a familiar dynamic of opposition and identification gives way to a hybrid sensation of distinction and empathy. Disgust and shame dissolve into a single state that is at once aware and affective, both knowing and invested – a stance, we might say, that is at one and the same time less guilty and more accepting.11 Again, a certain spiritual detachment mingles with a worldly selflessness, with an open affective potential – the ideal ego wrestles with a phenomenal intensity. The sad subject is not a subject at all, but something somewhere between consciousness, emotion, and affect, somewhere between itself and the given world. The sad subject occupies the position of the tragic itself, attuned to higher value, yet mixed up with its own corrupt pastness and futurity. It is committed to a kind of purity, yet invested in the fallen world it also creates. Once again, Scheler’s work helps us to understand the shape of Hulme’s emotion and its progressive

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aspects. In an essay on the tragic, he emphasizes the form’s emotional dimension, its play of hope and impossibility, striving and failure. In his formulation, tragic emotion at once acknowledges the possibility of a higher value, initiates the struggle for its attainment, and then admits the reasons for its impossibility. Indeed, the most significant tragic experience at once enacts and denies its own values – the greatest tragedies depict how the struggle for value confounds itself, the ways in which the necessary pursuit of higher value sometimes necessitates the expression of lower, less ideal values. More importantly, Scheler argues that while it is true that all tragic events are sad, they are sad in a particular sense. First and foremost, tragic sadness entails both a hopeful recognition of greater value as well as a calm acceptance of the failure to attain it. It remains aware of the permanence of values, beyond any worldly experience and humbly accepts their present impossibility. Relatedly, tragic sadness, while generated in the self, remains utterly detached from any specific object. Tragic sadness, he explains, is not psychological, but phenomenological – its investment begins with the worldly and ends with the absolute. It bemoans neither the loss of self nor the loss of an other, nor even the loss of history, but rather the terms of spiritual potential. Accordingly, ‘the specific sadness of the tragic is really an objective character of the event itself. It is independent of the individual circumstances of the beholder. It is free from the feeling provoked by excitement, indignation, blame, and the like. It is not accompanied by physical feelings or by what can be called real pain. It has a definite resignation, contentment, and a species of reconciliation with the existence which it chances to have’ (Scheler, 1954, pp. 181, 183). Hence, the tragic sadness of modernity. The same force does away with the values it hopes to bring into being – the same traits bring to catastrophe what could have been brought to fulfillment. A commitment to love leads to chauvinism, the call for brotherliness leads to corporate exploitation, the desire for community leads to international warfare. Yet Scheler’s formulation asks us to see beyond anger, beyond ego-investment. Anger at once appears as capitulation to the modern logic of opposition and an adoption of the guilt they accrued. We experience hate towards the moderns, and thus remain hateful – disgusted, therefore full of disgust. Conversely, sadness becomes the possibility of a simultaneous distinction and acceptance. We are not the moderns, and we do not blame them – I am not my father, and he is not an evil god. As Hulme and Scheler both knew, sadness lies at the origin of true fellow feeling. Through sadness, idealism is tempered and resentment overcome; through sadness, other minds are brought to us as having ‘a reality equal to our own’, and this acceptance is the beginning of benevolence, ‘love of someone simply because he is human and has the semblance of the man’ (Scheler, 1992, p. 69). For these thinkers, sadness is a spiritually significant mode by which alienation and egotism are overcome; it prepares the way for charity, by which one can increase the range of objects accessible to charity, by which value is sustained and opened up beyond itself to greater value (Scheler, 1992, pp. 70, 72).12 Tragic sadness looks beyond ego, beyond patrilineage, beyond guilt. It eschews the question of guilt. It gives up the comfort of good and bad moderns. Everyone did his part, history went according to its plan, value was recognized and

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then destroyed – we have been given this knowledge: ‘Out of this pardonable search for a subject upon whom to pin this ‘guilt’ . . . only out of this appears that specific tragic grief and tragic sympathy of which we have been speaking, along with its unique peace and reconciliation of the emotions. Now too the shifting of that which is to be feared to the cosmos itself appears as the essence of the reconciliation of the individual men and wills with the culminating deeds and events in which they have been taking part’ (Scheler, 1992, p. 188). Sadness may be the foundation of all emotional being. Sadness is the primary feeling – the first postlapsarian feeling – at once mired in purity and reborn in the muck, caught between an artificial ideal and the unlimited potential of the natural world. The most progressive moderns make a virtue of this interface, seeing within it the possibility of judgment as well as renewal, a necessary ideal and a necessary release from all idealism. Their sadness at once recognizes value as well as its defeat: it remains static, holding paradise in view, as it moves one into the world, amongst equals. This sadness is conscious and committed, yet it hums with life, it hums with the continuity of affect, with the perception of one’s own vitality and one’s place in the vital world (Massumi, 1995, p. 97). As I have been trying to argue, a tragic modernism might move us beyond the guilt of history, beyond the law of talion and continual expiation. Tragic modernism uncovers a way outside of ego, beyond psychoanalysis, and towards the local network, to the physiognomy of the local. It pushes us past the father, past the damning ambivalence of Oedipus; it welcomes us to the horde, the animistic clan, whose way of knowing is also a way of living. The most valuable scholarship may just be that which can feel its way through the field – a critical method that at once evaluates as it invests the landscape of our common history. Undoubtedly, Hulme’s own intellectual and personal failures occasioned this turn, but these failures continue to plague modernity at large. Indeed, his tragedy is ours. It begins in the public sphere, it culminates in the trenches of war; it is exacerbated by mass consumption, the fall of leaders, and the death of comrades. His great melancholy spirit is also our own. We can once again drown it out with march music or let it sing.

Notes 1

See Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body; Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents; Peter Nicholls, ‘Apes and Familiars’; Hal Foster, ‘Prosthetic Gods’; and Jessica Burstein, ‘Waspish Segments’. 2 According to Rei Terada, poststructuralist theory shows how theories of emotion have always been disruptive, if not outright antagonistic, to theories of subjectivity. For Terada, radical post-modern thought – as exemplified by de Man and Derrida – embraces emotion as ‘non-subjective experience in the form of self-difference within cognition’ and thus as the foundation of a radical post-humanist critique: ‘Poststructuralist thought about emotion is hidden in plain sight; poststructuralist theory deploys implicit and explicit logics of emotion and, as its very critics point out, willingly dramatizes particular emotions. It has reason to stress emotive experience, for far from controverting the “death of the subject”, emotion entails this death’ (p. 3).

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I recognize that several other theorists have recently devised competing definitions and rubrics for organizing the terms of affective experience; however, I believe that Massumi’s schema best allows me to pinpoint the significance of the moderns’ turn to affect and emotion. Given the space, I would have tried to align my approach with that developed by Charles Altieri in his excellent book The Particulars of Rapture. Altieri goes far towards defining the terms of affective experience as it occurs apart from the demands of either transcendental belief systems or unconscious desires and fantasies. Indeed, his work is most valuable insofar as it pinpoints the values of affective experience in itself, as they are realized in the immediate and dynamic cultivation of affective stances. He also shows precisely why and how these values became attractive to modernists who thus pushed their work into new realms of expression and engagement. That said, I ultimately think that Altieri’s commitment to the particulars of affective being tends to obscure other values that, while concomitant to affective experience, were equally important to the modernists. 4 For a more extensive discussion of Hulme’s emphasis on touch, see Edward Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-garde, pp. 120ff. 5 For Hulme on Scheler, see Hulme, Collected Writings, pp. 422 and 443. For Scheler’s biography, see Manfred Frings, Max Scheler and Harold J. Bershady, ‘Introduction’, in Max Scheler, On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing, pp. 1-46. 6 Quoted in Manfred Frings, Max Scheler, p. 94. 7 Adam Phillips is perhaps the best theorist of the modes and malfunctions of modernist psychology, and his work remains astutely aware of how this particular set of neurotic traits took shape as the theory of psychoanalysis. Not surprisingly, he recently turned his attention to Hulme’s biography and the question of modernist paranoia in a review titled ‘Hauteur’, in London Review of Books, (22 May 2003), pp. 10-12. 8 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 9 For Hulme and others on Original Sin, see Wallace Martin, The New Age under Orage; Dominic Baker-Smith, ‘Original Sin’; Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, pp. 101ff. 10 Such statements run counter to Raymond Williams’s critique of Hulme as a shameless absolutist opposed to human experience. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 190-5. 11 Freud, too, addresses the cultural persistence of the concept of Original Sin. In his work, though, its affective potential is recast in terms of paternal envy – Original Sin at once signals and manages a profound ambivalence towards the father (Totem, pp. 190ff.). Yet, later in this century, Freud’s German heirs will begin to look beyond the proscribed condition – the rigid relay of Oedipus – and recognize a certain sadness that is at once conscious, mobile, and transportive. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, in particular, explore melancholic loss as the foundation of a flexible critique. Adorno, in fact, explicitly defines the cultural critic as a complex bourgeois thinker perpetually caught within a state of Original Sin, at once removed from and embedded in the networks he hopes to analyze. See Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, pp. 155-200, 253-64; Theodor Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, pp. 17-34. 12 Here, again, our discussion of emotion finds itself both in and out of synch with psychological theory at large. The work of Melanie Klein, for example, charts a similar course from an early emphasis on anger and resentment towards a realization of the developmental necessity of sadness. Her theory is significant both for its depiction of paranoia and melancholy as related but competing attempts to protect the newly-emergent infantile ego and for its emphasis on the need to confront the former mode, particularly in its angry obsession with purity and degradation, with the latter’s caring incorporation and

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potential recognition of others. Klein’s work, however, seems problematic precisely because of its insistence on the need for healthy introjections and projections; as in Freud’s analysis, all is dependent on the developmental transition from part to whole objects and thus locked into the logic of subjective identification. See ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ and ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945, pp. 262-89, 344-69.

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Index Action Française 65, 89, 101, 111, 146, 154, 157, 188 Adeney, Bernard 60 Adorno, Theodor 4, 12, 13, 227 Aldington, Richard 53, 105, 136 Allied Artists’ Association 59, 60 Anderson, Perry 50-51 Antliff, Mark 116 Arendt, Hannah 4 Avery, Todd 20 Badmington, Neil 179 Baker-Smith, Dominic 164 Barnes, Djuna 210, 224 Bauman, Zygmunt 149-150 Bax, E. Belfort 143 Beasley, Rebecca 18 Bell, Clive 57, 61-62, 65, 69, 109, 175-176 Art 69 Bell, Vanessa 60 Belloc, Hilaire 137 Benjamin, Walter 6, 227 Berenson, Bernard 62, 64 Bergson, Henri 2, 3, 9, 23, 30, 39, 5053, 98-99, 101, 115-130, 139, 143, 188, 213-215, 218 Creative Evolution 118-119, 121, 124, 150 Introduction to Metaphysics 40, 99 Matter and Memory 116, 121, 124, 128 Time and Free Will 99, 119-120 Bevan, Robert 59 Binyon, Laurence 62-63, 64 Blanton, C. D. 20-21 Bloomfield, Paul 182 Bloomsbury 105, 109, 169-183 Bourdieu, Pierre 21 Bradbury, Malcolm 14

Bradley, F. H. 29 Brancusi, Constantin 79 Brooke, Rupert 2 Bullen, J. B. 163 Burrow, John 153 Butchvarov Panayot 173, 177 Caballero, Giménez 89 Calinescu, Matei 70 Cambridge Apostles 172-173 Cambridge Magazine 40, 41, 43, 171 Camden Town Group 57, 59, 60, 61 Carr, Helen 19 Carter, Huntly 63 Castoriadis, Cornelius 114 Cavalcanti, Guido 187, 190, 193 Cavell, Stanley 160 Cézanne, Paul 65, 105 Chesterton, G. K. 137, 200 Chinoiserie 63 Churchill, Winston 44 Clark, T. J. 13-14 Classicism 16 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 202 Comentale, Edward P. 21 Cowling, Elizabeth 81 Csengeri, Karen 8, 24, 70, 93, 169, 203 Cubism 76, 88-89 Davie, Donald 37, 190 Deleuze, Gilles 81-82, 182, 221 Derrida, Jacques 4, 13 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes 178 The Meaning of Good 178 Discord Club 34, 109 Duncan, Isadora 30 Eagleton, Terry 48, 53 Edwards, Paul 18

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Eliot, T. S. 4, 5, 11, 36, 40, 45, 86-87, 94, 134, 160-161, 165-166, 188, 203, 210-211 Empson, William 30 Epstein, Jacob 2, 5, 8, 17, 45, 58, 6566, 68, 73-83, 93, 111, 161162, 174, 188, 225 abstraction 74-75, 78-83 archaism 77-7 Adam 81 Charing Cross Station 78 Genesis 80-81 The Great Gantry 78 Interior of the British Museum Reading Room 78 Rock Drill 68, 74, 77, 86, 161162 Romilly John 76 Tomb of Oscar Wilde 76, 78 Venus 81, 84-85 Ernst, Paul 65, 66, 206 Etchells, Frederick 60 Etchells, Jessie 60 Eysteinsson, Astradur 8 Fabianism 9, 157 Farr, Florence 8 Faulkner, William 114-115, 128 The Sound and the Fury 114-115 Ferguson, Robert 26, 34, 65, 84, 105106, 117, 165 Fletcher, John Gould 58 Flint, F. S. 40, 52 Ford, Ford Madox 7, 213 The Good Soldier 213 Foucault, Michel 182 Frank, Joseph 57 Freud, Sigmund 201, 210, 216 Civilization and Its Discontents 210, 219 Totem and Taboo 219-221 Fry, Roger 57, 60, 61, 65, 67, 163, 174, 175 Fuller, Loïe 30 Garver, Lee 19, 20 Gasiorek, Andrzej 20 Gaudier-Brzeska 17, 45, 59, 78, 133, 174 de Gaultier, Jules 140, 170

Gill, Eric 60 Gillies, Mary Ann 39 Gilman, Harold 59 Ginner, Charles 59-60, 65, 67-68 Neo-Realism 67-68, 79 Gleizes, Albert 76 Golding, Louis 81 Gore, Spencer 59 de Gourmont, Remy 98 Grafton Group 62 Grant, Duncan 60, 174 Grayson, Victor 20, 134, 137-139, 146 Guattari, Felix 81-82, 221 Guild Socialism 9, 88 Guillaume, Paul 79 Gurhan, Leroy 82 Habermas Jürgen 7, 8, 14 Haldane, Richard Burdon 144-146 Halévy, Daniel 154 Hamilton, Cuthbert 60 Hansen, Miriam 6, 65, 192 Harmer, J. B. 23 Haskell, Arnold 74, 79 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) 136 Hegel, G. W. F. 200, 201 Heidegger, Martin 4, 28 Henley, W. E. 109 Heretics Club 40, 42 Holden, Charles 78 Holmes, C. J. 63 Housman, A. E. 32 Hulme, T. E. Works ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ 53, 62, 63, 99, 102, 151, 162 ‘A Notebook’ 10-11, 17, 25, 29-30, 41, 106, 151, 159, 163, 169, 170, 179, 181, 182, 216 ‘A Tory Philosophy’ 93, 154, 199 ‘Bax on Bergson’ 121 ‘Bergson, Balfour, and Politics’ 116, 117, 121, 127 ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ 48, 58, 62, 63, 125 ‘Cinders’ 17, 23-24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 63, 94, 95-97, 102-103, 105, 140, 150, 164, 169, 215 ‘Haldane’ 144

Index ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ 45, 58, 73, 75, 86, 103 ‘Mr. Epstein and the Critics’ 656, 80, 151 ‘Notes on Bergson’ 24, 39 ‘Notes on Language and Style’ 23-24, 25, 27, 47, 48, 63, 100 ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’ 133, 146 ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ 41, 44-45, 50-52, 62, 102, 154, 179, 191, 199 Speculations 16, 24, 43, 105, 191 ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’ 118, 124 ‘The Sculpture of Epstein’ 73-74 ‘War Notes’ 106, 109, 146, 170, 180-181 ‘Works by David Bomberg’ 69 Themes abjection 77 abstract art 76-77, 78-83 adolescence 209-211, 218-219 anarchism 17 anti-humanism 20, 164-166, 171, 179, 184-185 appetite 4, 83-86 art criticism 57-71, 74 Bergson, Henri 3, 5, 17, 25, 29, 30-31, 33-34, 39, 50-53, 64, 98-99, 107, 161-162, 213-215 Bloomsbury 172, 174-179 British imperialism 145-146 Byzantine art 66, 75, 159-160, 163, 204-206, 207-208 Canada 31, 35, 95-97, 107-108 Classicism 4, 7, 31, 155-157 discontinuity 5, 24-25, 184 Eliot, T. S. 165-166 emotion 209-227 Epstein, Jacob 70-71, 73-82 ethics 108, 111, 171, 180-185 Imagism 15-16, 36, 47-49 language 11-12, 39-53, 95-101 Lasserre, Pierre 2, 5, 65, 101-102, 116, 150, 218 Lechmere, Kate 74, 83-86, 109 Levellers, the 111, 158 Lewis, Wyndham 73, 75-78, 8388

245 machine aesthetics 12, 20, 75, 159-163 masculinity 94, 108-111, 219 medievalism 191-199, 205-208 modernism 5, 7-17 New Age 5, 66-67, 106, 134-146 Original Sin 73, 84, 86-88, 191, 199-204, 206-208, 224 pacifism 41, 158, 175-176 Pascal, Blaise 73, 107-108, 158, 162, 164, 165-166 phenomenology 210, 211, 215219 poetics 23-37, 46-53, 96-102, 135 politics 17, 88-89,134, 152-166, 179-180 pragmatism 17, 150 psychology 123-124, 129-130 Poets’ Club 98 Pound, Ezra 2, 5, 11, 17, 21, 23, 26, 36, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51-53, 70, 105, 136, 187, 189-190, 193 Proudhon, Jean-Pierre 17, 20, 73, 153, 155-159 public sphere 7-13 Renaissance humanism 75-76, 80-82, 150-151, 184-185, 204205 Romanticism 31, 35, 110, 116117, 126-127, 151 sadness 209, 224-227 sex 83-86, 133-134 sexual politics 141-143 Sorel, Georges 3, 17, 153-159, 165, 199 temporality 114-130, 190, 201202 theology 20, 108, 152-153, 159166, 181-182 Toryism 17, 127-128, 154 violence 98, 133, 141, 154-155 war 106-108, 146 Worringer, Wilhelm 19, 59, 66, 68, 77, 82, 103-104, 106, 151 Husserl, Edmund 170 Hynes, Sam 188 Jameson, Fredric 48, 53 Japonisme 63

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Jones, Alun R. 27, 58 Kandinsky, Vassily 79 Kant, Immanuel 208 Kennedy, J. M. 139 Kenner, Hugh 17, 188 Kermode, Frank 30 Kern, Stephen 113 Keynes, John Maynard 172, 173, 177 Kierkegaard, Søren 160, 165, 201 The Book on Adler 160 Concluding Unscientific Postscript 160 Kimball, Roger 127 Klein, Melanie 227 Lacan, Jacques 30 Laforgue, Jules 36 Lamb, Henry 60 Lasserre, Pierre 2, 5, 65, 101-102, 116, 150, 218 Latour, Bruno 218, 222-224 Lechmere, Kate 74, 83-86, 109 Levenson, Michael 16, 70, 93-94, 107, 111, 135, 136, 169, 170-172, 189-190 Leverenz, David 109-110 Levinas, Emmanuel 114, 178 Levy, Oscar 139 Lewis, Wyndham 2, 7, 12, 45, 46-47, 59, 61-62, 68-69, 73-88, 105, 153, 189, 191, 210, 224 abjection 87-88 anti-pathos 109-110 anti-vitalism 82-83 Blast 174 Blasting and Bombardiering 86 Kermesse 88-89 Men Without Art 86-87 ‘One-Way Song’ 85 Original Sin 87-88, 200 Romanticism and Classicism 87-88 The Caliph’s Design 12-13 Time and Western Man 153 Lightfoot, Malcolm 60 Lipps, Theodor 64 Lloyd, H. M. 40 London Group 62 Ludovici, Anthony 10, 67, 88, 133, 139 Lukács, Georg 48-50, 53

MacCarthy, Desmond 61, 67 MacFarlane, James 14 MacIntyre, Alasdair 149, 165 de Maeztu, Ramiro 8, 88-89 Maguire, T. Miller 144-145 Mallarmé, Stephane 35 de Man, Paul 4 Mann, Thomas 115, 128 The Magic Mountain 115 Manson, J. B. 61 Marinetti, F. T. 76 Marsden, Dora, 136, 146 Egoist 136, 146 New Freewoman 136 Massumi, Brian 211, 227 Matz, Jesse 19 Maurras, Charles 65, 89, 116 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4, 13 Metzinger, Jean 76 Mill, John Stuart 170 Modernism 1-21, 113, 215 commodification 47-48 radicalism 57, 69-70 temporality 113-130 late modernism 224 Modigliani, Amedeo 79 Monk, Ray 46 Moore, G. E. 20, 39, 169, 170, 171, 173-174, 176-179 Principia Ethica 171-173, 177, 182, 183 Morrell, Ottoline 42 Mosley, Oswald 88 Mullarkey, John 121 Munton, Alan 19 Myers, C. S. 42-43 National Observer 109 Nemo, Philippe 178 Neo-Realism 67-68 Nevinson, Christopher 58, 59 New Age 10, 19-20, 23, 39, 45, 58, 69, 88, 134-146, 171, 192 New English Art Club 60 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29, 31, 93, 95-96, 98, 139, 149, 160, 165, 218 North, Michael 42, 44, 95 Nussbaum, Martha 183-184 Ogden, C. K. 40, 43-44

Index Olson, Charles 36 Omega Workshops 62 Orage, A. R. 9, 19, 24, 58, 67, 88, 137, 142, 144, 192 Pascal, Blaise, 73, 107-108, 158, 162, 164, 165-166, 200 Picasso, Pablo 79 Pissaro, Lucien 59 Plato 86 Poets’ Club 26, 33 Pollock, Frederick 173 Post-Impressionism 60, 61, 67 Postmodernism 13, 113 Pound, Ezra 2, 5, 11, 17, 21, 23, 26, 36, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51-53, 70, 105, 136, 187, 189-190, 193 The Cantos 46, 191, 213 Cavalcanti Guido 193-195 Medievalism 193-195 Proudhon, Jean-Pierre 17, 20, 88, 155159 On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church 159 What is Property? 156, 158 Proust, Marcel 122, 128, 129-130 Pugh, Edwin 137 Rae, Patricia 11 Rainey, Lawrence 15 Rajchman, John 82 Read, Herbert 8, 16, 58, 93, 95-96, 105, 107, 188, 191 Regan, Tom 174 Reification of language 47-55 Renan, Ernst 93, 94 Richards, I. A. 46 Richardson, John 76 Riegl, Alois 206 Ritter, Alan 159 Roberts, Michael 188 Roberts, William 17, 36 Robins, Anna Gruezner 65 Robinson, Alan 50 Romanticism 16, 36 Rorty, Richard 166 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 157 The Social Contract 157 Russell, Bertrand 2, 23, 39, 40-41, 88, 108, 146, 171, 173, 180, 212

247 Rutter, Frank 59 Sartre, Jean-Paul 110 Saunders, Helen 78 Scheler, Max 217-218, 225-226 Schmitt, Carl 201 Schwartz, Sanford 51-52, 101, 126 Selver, Paul 1 Shaw, George Bernard 40, 110, 137, 157 Shusterman, Richard 169 Sickert, Walter 59, 60, 61, 69 Smith, Stan 16 Soper, Kate 179 Sorel, Georges 2, 3, 146, 154-155, 165, 188, 203, 206 Reflections on Violence 155 Spencer, Herbert 170 Spencer, Stanley 60 Stein, Gertrude 224 Stirner, Max 136 Stout, G. F. 173 Strachey, Lytton 172, 177 Taylor, G. R. S. 140 Thacker, Andrew 18 Thompson, E. P. 113 Tory Radicalism 153-154 Trotter, David 109 Vaughan, Bernard 78 Vorticism 59, 65, 75, 104-105 Wadsworth, Edward 60 Wells, H. G. 137 Wexler, Joyce 15 Whistler, James MacNeill 63, 69 Whitehead, A. N. 40 Wieseltier, Leon 165 Wilde, Oscar 36, 108 Williams, Bernard 182, 183-185 Williams, Raymond 7, 45-46, 47-48, 53, 157 Williams, William Carlos 29, 36 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 42-53, 97, 169, 173, 176 Philosophical Investigations 42, 46 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4347, 53 Woolf, Leonard 172

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Woolf, Virginia 115, 213, 224 To the Lighthouse 115, 213

Worringer, Wilhelm 19, 59, 66, 68, 77, 82, 103-104, 106, 151, 206, 218