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.
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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
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
vii
1
The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
Paul Edwards
23
A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme,
Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language
Andrew Thacker
39
‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of
T. E. Hulme
Rebecca Beasley
57
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E.
Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis
Alan Munton
73
T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
Helen Carr
93
Hulme’s Compromise and The New
Psychologism
Jesse Matz
113
Hulme Among the Progressives
Lee Garver
133
Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?:
Politics, Machine Aesthetics, and Religion
Andrzej Gasiorek
149
vi
9
10
11
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and
Two Trajectories of Ethical Anti-Humanism
Todd Avery
169
The Politics of Epochality: Antinomies of
Original Sin
C. D. Blanton
187
Hulme’s Feelings
Edward P. Comentale
209
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).
viii
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
2
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
3
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,
4
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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,
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
5
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
6
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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.
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
7
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
8
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
9
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
10
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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).
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
11
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
12
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
13
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
14
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
15
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,
16
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
17
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
18
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
19
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
20
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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 –
Introduction: On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism
21
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
22
4
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
24
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
25
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
26
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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,
The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
27
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
28
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
29
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
30
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
31
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
32
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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:
The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
33
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
34
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
35
‘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
36
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
37
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
38
6
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
40
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
A Language of Concrete Things
41
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,
42
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
A Language of Concrete Things
43
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 . . .
44
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
A Language of Concrete Things
45
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
46
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
A Language of Concrete Things
47
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
48
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
A Language of Concrete Things
49
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
50
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
A Language of Concrete Things
51
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
52
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
A Language of Concrete Things
53
‘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.
54
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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).
A Language of Concrete Things
55
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
58
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme
59
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
60
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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).
‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme
61
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).
62
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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).
‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme
63
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
64
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme
65
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
66
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme
67
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme
69
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme
71
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future
75
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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).
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future
77
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future
79
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future
81
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.
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future
83
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
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future
85
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
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future
87
(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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future
89
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).
90
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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.
Abstraction, Archaism and the Future
17
91
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
T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
95
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
T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
97
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
T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
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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
T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
105
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
T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
107
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
T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
109
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
T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
111
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.
112
12
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
‘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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115
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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117
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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119
‘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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121
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
Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism
123
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
Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism
125
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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T .E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism
127
‘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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T .E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism
129
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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T .E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism
131
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
(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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135
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
Hulme Among the Progressives
137
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
Hulme Among the Progressives
139
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
Hulme Among the Progressives
141
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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Yes, but how true! That is indeed the first contribution made by women to modern
thought: her discovery that personality underlies even mathematics.
Nietzsche said that.
I always thought Nietzsche was a woman. Otherwise he would not have pretended to
despise them so.
But if your reasons are personal, they carry no weight.
On the contrary, only personal opinions have any weight at all. Only for personal
reasons will men act, and action, after all, is next to everything. (Orage, 1909a, p. 300)
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
Hulme Among the Progressives
143
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
Hulme Among the Progressives
145
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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.
Hulme Among the Progressives
147
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?
151
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?
153
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?
155
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
Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?
157
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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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
Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?
165
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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.
Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?
3
167
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury and Anti-Humanism
171
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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).
‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury and Anti-Humanism
173
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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,
‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury and Anti-Humanism
175
‘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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necessary that during its horrid and circumscribing labours there should have been men
who, detached and undismayed, continued to serve interests higher and wider than the
interests of any state or confederacy. (Bell, 1915a, p. 7, my italics)
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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177
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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181
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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183
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)
‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury and Anti-Humanism
185
– 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
The Politics of Epochality
189
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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191
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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195
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
Cavalcanti
↑
←
[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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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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197
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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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199
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Hulme’s Feelings
223
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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).
Hulme’s Feelings
225
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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T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Hulme’s Feelings
227
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).
228
3
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
Hulme’s Feelings
229
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
244
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
246
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
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
248
T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism
Woolf, Virginia 115, 213, 224
To the Lighthouse 115, 213
Worringer, Wilhelm 19, 59, 66, 68,
77, 82, 103-104, 106, 151, 206,
218