T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism 9781472582027, 9781474249973, 9781472582010

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Discord Club
2 Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic
3 The Politics of Classicism
4 Varieties of Abstraction
5 ‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman is Professor in the History of Modern Ideas at Teesside University, UK; and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/American avantgarde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series Titles: Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, edited by Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer, Alex Latter The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism Henry Mead

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Henry Mead, 2015 Henry Mead has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.



ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-8202-7 ePDF: 978-1-4725-8201-0 ePub: 978-1-4725-8203-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Historicizing Modernism Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

For Hilary and Nicholas Mead

Contents List of Illustrations viii Series Editor’s Preface ix Acknowledgements x List of Abbreviations xi Introduction1 1 2 3 4 5

The Discord Club25 Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic57 The Politics of Classicism103 Varieties of Abstraction139 ‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu183

Conclusion229 Works Cited237 Index261

List of Illustrations Chapter 4 Figure 1 Jacob Epstein, Rock Drill (Reconstruction, 1974). Polyester resin, wood and ready-made drill. 205 cm × 141.5 cm. Credit: © The artist’s estate / Photo © Birmingham Museums Trust.

152

Figure 2 David Bomberg, In the Hold (1913–1914). Oil on canvas, 198 × 256.5 cm. Credit: © The artist’s estate / Photo © Tate, London 2015.

166

Figure 3 David Bomberg, The Mud Bath (1914). Oil on canvas, 152.5 × 224 cm. Credit: © The artist’s estate / Photo © Tate, London 2015.

168

Series Editor’s Preface This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth-century literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, two burgeoning sub-disciplines of Modernism, Beckett studies and Pound studies, feature heavily as exemplars of the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’ authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally-based exploration shall also be included. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘Modernism’ itself. Similarly, the very notion of ‘historicizing’ Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning

Acknowledgements I am indebted to Ronald Bush for supervising the thesis upon which this book is based. The research was funded with support from the Stapley and Newby Trusts and Worcester College’s Martin Senior Scholarship. Thanks to staff and friends at the Bodleian, the Codrington, Keele University Library, Hull University Library and St. John’s College Archive, Cambridge. For valued advice, I am indebted to Stephen Thomson, J. B. Bullen, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Nick Kneale, Andrzej Gasiorek, Alexandra Franklin, Judith Priestman, Helen Carr, Rebecca Beasley, Sanford Schwartz, Patricia Rae, Robert Ferguson, Bernard Vere, John Burrow, Tom Villis, Paul Jackson, Jennifer Johnson, Christos Hadjiyiannis, Jenny Rushworth, Alex Thomson, Finn Fordham, Erik Tonning and Matthew Feldman. Special thanks to my parents, to Francis, Alison and Eleanor Sanders for having me at Keele, to Jennifer Fry and family, Peter Turner, John-Paul McCarthy, John Bolin, Lilly, Rob, Lucy and Chip, and to the Reeds for their hospitality at Halford and Elgin – in particular, to Bibs.

List of Abbreviations References to works by T. E. Hulme which appeared in print during his lifetime give both the original publication details (usually in the New Age or the Commentator) and details of the text as reprinted in the Collected Writings – for example: ‘ “The New Philosophy”, NA, 5.10 (1 July 1909), 198–9; CW, pp. 85–88.’ Texts published after Hulme’s death are cited as they appear in the Collected Writings, for example: ‘“Romanticism and Classicism”, CW, pp. 59–73.’ Authorial details for works by Hulme are omitted after the first citation. NA  The New Age: A Weekly Journal of Ideas and Politics (London: Social Credit Society 1894–1938). CW The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). EIG  Théodule Ribot, L’Évolution des idées générales (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1897). EGI  Théodule Ribot, The Evolution of General Ideas, trans. F. A. Welby (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1899).

Introduction

The ideological politics of modernism have presented sympathetic critics with seemingly insurmountable problems. Eliot, Pound and Yeats have in particular been held to account for their various anti-Semitic, elitist and authoritarian views. But narrow readings of a narrow literary canon hardly do justice to the full political range of a complex, international movement. This book seeks a larger definition of modernism and asks which, if any, of its ideological components might be salvageable as part of a liberal democratic tradition. To do so, it contextualizes an established figure in Anglo-American modernism, T. E. Hulme, within a network of lesser-known writers both in Europe and in the London avant-garde, thus revealing the various shades of opinion that together came under the broad classification of modernism. It assents to, but seeks to refine, long-standing treatments of Hulme’s politics as paradigmatic of the modern movement and proposes that, within the cluster of concepts that make up his thought, some elements might be reconcilable with pluralistic theories of democracy. Work to refine received notions of the modernist canon and its politics is well underway. For example, after a period of generalization regarding modernism’s right-wing tendency, critics now emphasize an earlier stage of modernist anarchism, a phase of writing that attacked the reductive treatment of the individual by utilitarian liberalism. A rich seam of research has explored modernism’s affinities with radical individualism in its denunciation of the anonymizing, abstracting effects of liberal rationalism.1 For many years identified with the radical right, perhaps even with the beginnings of fascism, Hulme has more recently become associated with these libertarian currents.2 While this book adds to the growing literature that gives the anarchist side of modernism as much emphasis as the conservative one, it extends this argument by suggesting that these coexisted as simultaneous facets of Hulme’s work, and that this doubleness, this interest in both chaos and order, might be treated as a paradigm for the larger cultural movement. Going further, the study suggests that this tension between individualism and authority has a deeper significance, indicating a desire, both in Hulme’s work and the wider movement, to assert the free will of individuals via their recognition of a higher law, if only as a pragmatic

2

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

measure. Finally, the study suggests that conceptual elements of this idea correspond to contemporary forms of pluralistic or ‘agonistic’ liberalism, which recognize the limits of human cognition and the value of faith as a functional shield against contingency.

Soho, 1911 Wandering down Frith Street to Soho Square in London on a Tuesday evening in 1911, one’s attention might be drawn to the lighted windows of a house on the corner just above the square. Here gathered some of the key figures of the Edwardian avant-garde, including poets, artists and political radicals. One might even make out among the assembled voices the distinctive tones of their host, Thomas Ernest Hulme, whose accent marked him as a native of North Staffordshire, where he was born in 1883 to a farming family. By 1911, Hulme – known to friends as Tommy – was at the peak of his powers, and his pugnacious intellect, his nasal, nagging tones and burly appearance left a vivid trace in his contemporaries’ minds. Having been sent down from Cambridge for disruptive behaviour and given up a second degree in biology at UCL he worked his way across Canada, studied languages in Belgium and immersed himself in modern European literature. By 1908 he had chosen to pursue a literary calling and soon became a main axis of London intellectual life.3 Hulme’s significance was not merely as a salon host, but as one of the main conduits for new ideas then entering Britain from the continent. A voracious reader and publicist of French and German thought, he played a key role in shaping Anglo-American responses to and adaptations of the European avant-garde. His first objective was to achieve an ‘extreme modernism’ in poetry, with a use of precise vers libre, a style later re-described in terms of a ‘classicist’ revival that would overturn the prevailing modern spirit of romanticism. This determination would echo through the work of Ezra Pound and the Imagists, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, among other major literary modernists. In the same period, Hulme turned his hand to philosophy and politics, promoted the work of Henri Bergson and the Neo-Royalist movement in France, declared himself a Tory and attempted to forge a new political language for conservatism in England. By 1913, he had embarked on a short but deeply influential career in art criticism, supporting the revolutionary abstract sculptors and painters who moved in his social circle. Welcoming the outbreak of war, he enrolled as a private and was sent to Belgium, where he fought at St Eloi before being invalided home in early 1915 with a

Introduction

3

gunshot wound. There followed a phase of polemical writing against pacifism and in favour of the ethical theories of Georges Sorel, Edmund Husserl and G. E. Moore, among others, before he gained an officer’s commission with the Royal Marine Artillery. His battles on various intellectual and geographic fronts ended with his death aged 34 in 1917 at Oostduinkerke, following a direct hit by a German shell. Little known during his life, his work reached a new audience in 1924 with the publication of certain of his writings under the title Speculations. Also present at Frith Street could be found Alfred Richard Orage, the editor of the radical socialist journal the New Age, whose offices in Chancery Lane were another hub of intellectual exchange. Orage also spoke with an accent, this time from Yorkshire, and it is significant that he and Hulme were thus marked with an outsider status within the metropolitan elite. One aspect of modernism’s hybrid internationalism involved the penetration of a ‘provincial avant-garde’ into the intellectual vortex of the capital: some of the most radical ideas of modern Europe were thus first enunciated in Britain in Hulme’s ‘cussed’ or Orage’s ‘seductive’ Northern tones.4 A graduate of one of the teaching colleges established after the 1870 Education Act, Orage had taught for several years in the poorer parts of Leeds while reading intensely and widely. Later, with his friend Holbrook Jackson, he had formed the Leeds Art Club, a key network of provincial modernism which combined interests in socialism, mysticism and the arts. In 1908, he and Jackson moved to London and, with support from the Fabian Society, took over the socialist weekly the New Age. Hulme would find an intellectual home here, among socialists whose revolutionary energy he shared. The energy of the modernist movement was closely tied to the opening of British democracy to a new class of voters and the emergence of a working-class intelligentsia who combined forms of political and spiritual utopianism. Socialism had rapidly gained ground in Britain from the 1870s with the formation of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, the spread of provincial branches of the Independent Labour Party, the growing influence of the London-based Fabian Society and the rise of a collectivizing, Idealist form of New Liberalism. The Liberal landslide of 1906 saw the arrival of the first Labour MPs and set the stage for the suffragette movement’s most militant phase. By 1911, the Liberal fight to pass the National Insurance Bill, the resulting, forced reform of the House of Lords, and a spate of protests, strikes and riots across the nation seemed to presage revolution.5 In many ways, Orage was the most radical socialist of his generation. Sole editor of the New Age from 1908, he took the journal well beyond Fabian orthodoxy, exploring the far reaches of the political spectrum and artistic

4

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

practice, promoting Guild Socialism, Nietzscheanism, Bergsonism, theosophy, Freudian psychology, Gurdjieffian mysticism and social credit. In Orage, the Edwardian avant-garde found one of its most generous supporters: arguably, the New Age was the most important of those publications that gave British modernists a wider audience.6 Here, Hulme had found a salon in print, with its editor playing an alert and acerbic host, often encouraging, always critical. One of Hulme’s few equals in debate, Orage was a Socratic figure who acted as mentor and supporter for many modernist figures including Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield and Edwin Muir. This exponent of socialism in the spirit of William Morris and Edward Carpenter, an advocate for willed spiritual evolution who would still insist, however, that ‘man is a fixed species’, would be the publisher of most of Hulme’s work. This study proposes that Orage’s intellectual exchange with Hulme exemplifies a distinctive modernist synthesis of left- and rightwing ideology; consequently, his writing takes centre stage at some points in the following chapters. Other colleagues from the New Age included the Imagists F. S. Flint, H. D. Richard Aldington and Pound; Georgian poets including Harold Monro and Rupert Brooke; members of Walter Sickert’s Fitzroy Group including Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner; and Vorticists and sympathizers including William Roberts, Frederick Etchells, Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg. Just outside the building Hulme would fight with Wyndham Lewis and hang him upside down from the railings of the square, settling a quarrel over the affections of the artist Kate Lechmere whose private wealth had bankrolled the Vorticists’ Blast magazine of 1914–1915. It was from this busy social scene that the modernist movement, or at least several intersecting strands of ideas later collectively known as modernism, would emerge. Numerous relationships and exchanges of ideas would gradually harden into a canon of works and principles. Hulme’s ideas, for example, were partly subsumed into Eliot’s long-standing influence on letters and the academy. The long shadow of a literary and artistic orthodoxy that shaped twentieth-century taste began in Soho conversation, in the cross-fertilization of ideas between readers of continental literature. The monuments of the modern English canon began in this swirling vortex of ideas. To reconstruct the teeming intellectual vitality of this social network presents several problems. The New Age is a key resource, perhaps the closest we come to a transcript of conversations left for the most part unrecorded. Talk was Hulme’s first and favourite medium, conducted at Frith Street and at certain other gatherings, for example, the New Age’s editorial meetings at the ABC tea shop in Chancery Lane, the Imagist poets’ favoured Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel

Introduction

5

on Percy Street and the artistic circle that gathered at Robert Bevan’s house at Swiss Cottage.7 Hulme’s thinking was deeply interwoven with that of those around him. A contemporary recalled him at the Café Royal, moving from table to table, joining one conversation after another, carrying ideas from faction to faction. To summarize his thought is to freeze this mobile, complex exchange; a game of intellectual musical chairs brought to an increasingly dead halt, first by publication, then by the author’s death, then by the gathering and editing of his corpus and finally, by protracted literary analysis. Yet Hulme may well have appreciated the process of abstraction as reductive, useful and necessary, making graspable at least the bones of an ultimately unknowable vitality. * * * Hulme was one of a generation inspired by Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche and William James, philosophers often associated with a widespread ‘revolt against positivism’ – an interrogation of the confidences of Victorian epistemology which provides the starting point and background for this study.8 As Sanford Schwartz has put it, these philosophers were concerned with a distinction between ‘conscious surfaces and unconscious depths’, between the conceptual and the intuitive.9 Rejecting the geometries of positivism, they proposed that, at a deeper level, experience consisted of a state of flux, a ‘stream of consciousness’.10 To different degrees, they proposed that the overconfident reliance on what amounted to a conceptual fiction could be overcome: for Bergson, the conceptual surface could be penetrated to reach the flux below, in a kind of inversion of Platonism. For Nietzsche, the flux was not accessible; rather, life consisted in the continual remodelling of the conceptual life to make afresh what was never fundamentally true. Like Bergson and Nietzsche, James suggested there was a way to get beyond, or break up, the schematic grid of knowledge, to achieve either direct contact with intuitive reality, or to repeatedly construct and break up new ‘grids’ of knowledge, thus never allowing them to become deadening.11 Hulme began his career by developing a poetry that sought to arrest the reader’s attention by putting together unexpected images, to create a new ‘visual chord’.12 Such language would impede the smooth associations of the mind, drawing attention to the complexity of first-hand experience. This was one way to break up the ‘grid’ of conceptual life described by Schwartz. Yet it also represented, in Ronald Bush’s words, a ‘literary revolution with deep social and philosophical foundations’.13 The rhetoric of Imagism suggested that the degradation of language was a sign not only of the deceptive facility of conceptual

6

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

life, but of a culture and society similarly rationalized. Just as individuals and their thoughts were reduced to counters, a degraded language dealt in ossifying abstractions, disconnected from what they once signified. Ezra Pound associated it with the glib style developed by a rapidly expanding newspaper industry.14 The rise of literacy, and an industry of journalism to cater for it, seemed to exemplify the reliance on ‘counter’ ideas. These were signs of the rise of ‘the masses’, a phenomenon that caused modernists much anxiety.15 Imagism’s focus on the evils of cliché and stereotype is telling; those words had gained their pejorative meaning only in 1890. They refer originally to the industrial processes that were developing to cater for a mass reading public: the word ‘cliché’, deriving from the French verb ‘cliquer’, refers to the process of moulding a printing plate, while the stereotype was the type of plate that made possible the mass production of newspapers.16 It is important to register that, as Bush puts it, this ‘revulsion from mass literacy and mass journalism […] was only a symptom of something deeper still, philosophy’s critique of Enlightenment reason and progress, which involved exploring the irrational motives behind not only newspaper prose but all logical discourse’.17 The link between the ‘revolt against positivism’ and the resistance to cliché is not so much an analogy as a correlation, facets of a single problem. It is important to avoid cutting off the poetic idea from the philosophical or political one. While electoral democracy expanded in the late nineteenth century, it seemed to many radicals a distracting amelioration of a fundamentally dysfunctional society dominated by capitalist concerns. Moreover, it represented a rationalization of multifarious individual experiences. The liberal acceptance of universal suffrage, accompanied by moves towards centralized welfarism, was threatening to radical eyes. Indeed, it reduced individuals to a state of anonymous servility, their vote, and their selves, mere statistical abstractions.18 Modernist texts reflect a related reaction: a ‘fear of abstraction’ in literary style reflected an aversion to the subordination and immersion of the individual within the crowd, tapping into long-standing anxieties concerning the ‘general will’.19 These ideas shed light on why Imagism flourished within intellectual networks primarily concerned with radical politics. Hulme and his collaborators had close links to two journals, the New Age and the Egoist, which, merging radical ideas from across Europe and America with an indigenous current of anti-liberal thinking, were ideal venues for an aesthetic resistant to the abstracting effects of modernity. The political character of modernism has been the subject of much critical debate.20 Michael North’s study of modernism’s ‘political aesthetic’ highlights the concern in post-Kantian political thought to maintain the value of

Introduction

7

the individual while concentrating the power of the community. In philosophical and political terms, Hegel argued that the subject and object, the individual and the community, must be united through the processes of world history.21 This notion, North suggests, correlated with the notion in German thought that ‘the aesthetic object […], “a whole in itself,” [has] the power to harmonize faculties that are in conflict outside it’, to achieve a ‘reconciliation of multiplicity in unity’.22 This discussion was radicalized by the Young Hegelian movement of the 1840s, which elaborated Hegel’s ideas, turning a rightist philosophy to the left in defiance of an oppressive Prussian state. The theories of Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner and Karl Marx in turn described how an abstraction of values subordinated individuals to larger forces.23 Discussions in modern British political writing concerning the reconciliation of individual freedom and communal unity reflect the impact of German Idealism, as does a persistent analogy between social and aesthetic equilibrium.24 The modernist aesthetic inherited such a utopianism – as Terry Eagleton puts it, ‘a dream of reconciliation – of individuals woven into intimate unity with no detriment to their specificity, of an abstract totality suffused with all the flesh-and-blood reality of the individual being’.25 As these ideas penetrated British culture, they were met by an indigenous line of thought regarding the ‘organic society’, traceable back to writings by Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris among others, which attacked laissez-faire economics and utilitarian ethics and drew a connection between art, literature and society. Raymond Williams has described how the objection to atomization and the dream of identity-in-diversity occurred at both ends of the political spectrum: ‘one kind of conservative thinker, and one kind of socialist thinker [...] seemed to use the same terms, not only for criticising a laissez-faire society, but also for expressing the idea of a superior society’.26 The most advanced British writers of the early twentieth century, informed not only by Ruskin and Morris, but also by the continental ideas sketched above, developed a politics radical in style, but surprisingly conservative in ethical principle. These writers looked forward as well as back, calling not for regression to a feudal society, but imagining a future in which industry could be marshalled to support a new form of social harmony. The notion of integrity in art ran alongside such notions of social unity, as did the attempt to combine forward momentum with a sense of tradition. The history of Imagism, and more broadly modernism, as borne out in the radical periodicals of Edwardian England, coincided with this interaction between the radical left and right. In particular, the New Age was the crucible for a range of avant-garde ideologies that resisted the encroachments

8

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

of an atomizing liberal individualism. Within the New Age, and alongside such anti-liberal radicals as A. R. Orage and Ramiro de Maeztu, we find the distinctive voice of Hulme, whose writing on philosophy, poetics, politics and the visual arts presents, in sum, an integrated worldview of anti-humanist classicism.

Family trees and composite portraits The philosophical moment that produced ‘modernism’ is also responsible for trends in historiography that complicate its chronicling. The political and aesthetic positions described above were closely related to a crisis concerning the limits of knowledge. These ideas bestowed on following generations a sense of relativism, self-consciousness and irony – features of post-modern historiography and literary theory.27 The task of placing Hulme in context among his contemporaries again raises questions of identity-in-diversity, abstraction and specificity. The ‘revolt against positivism’, ‘modernism’ and even ‘imagism’ are all abstract categories concealing the intricate and contested detail of actual events.28 The utilitarian and partial nature of such frames is made clear by the vexed pursuit of an all-encompassing definition of ‘modernism’. Even as scholars acknowledge its ‘fissiparous’ nature, the drive to establish ‘ideal types’ is persistent, as we see in the many primers and introductions that enumerate the movement’s particular sets of ideas and attributes.29 This drive to speciation, to establish categories, and their confusion with eternal truths, recalls the positivist fallacy criticized so vigorously by Hulme. The Victorian positivism that Hulme sought to dispel is exemplified by Francis Galton’s invention of the composite portrait, whereby numerous photographic images of certain sociological ‘types’, when superimposed upon one another, would generate an abstract general image. Despite the refinements of postmodern historiography, there remains in scholarship a nagging desire to get before its eyes le moderniste moyen, the composite portrait.30 Another such cognitive metaphor is that of the family tree, deployed in intellectual, literary and art history as ‘an almost every day practice in constituting knowledge’.31 The act of classification, in history and biology alike, is a matter of convenience: we group together things that resemble each other. These categories become hardened; we assume they reflect some essential, universal truth. Historical controversy operates by breaking up such categories, by challenging old likenesses and suggesting new ones. Again, this is achieved through metaphor.

Introduction

9

The daring new thesis marks the shattering of old categorizations, but also the suggestion of new analogies, new classifications. The historian Carlo Ginzburg has described the process of writing history as the construction and demolition of metaphor – of general rules. Ginzburg contrasts the common ‘cognitive metaphors’ of the composite portrait and the family tree, considering both in light of Nietzsche’s deconstruction of scientific order in ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’ and in light of Wittgenstein’s theory of ‘family resemblances’. Despite the apparent naive premises of these historical tools in light of Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s insights, Ginzburg acknowledges the need to fabricate rules through the categorization of phenomena on the strength of analogy. Indeed, as he says, attention to anomaly is only possible if we have a rule to break. We require structures. However, having accepted ‘norms’, it is more profitable in his view to study ‘transgressions’, to pursue ‘blurred edges, mistakes and anomalies’.32 With this in view, it is worth considering Hulme’s customary place in larger genealogies or composite portraits of modernism. Michael Levenson’s influential account in A Genealogy of Modernism defined modernism as ‘individualist before it was anti-individualist, anti-traditional before it was traditional, inclined to anarchism before it was inclined to authoritarianism’.33 This has proven to be a persistent narrative in modernist studies, recurring prominently in the work of Bruce Clarke and Robert van Hallberg, for example.34 However, it has always required selective reading of the many individual authors it co-opts. Hulme is often placed centre stage in this narrative. His significance lies in the long-standing perception of an apparent disjunction in his thought, resulting largely from the undated and out of sequence presentation of his writings in Speculations.35 At first, Hulme seemed simply muddled, his work switching between a Bergsonian appreciation of the stream of individual consciousness beneath the fixed world of concepts and a conservative desire to establish objective and absolute laws.36 Once the chronology of his work was established, it appeared to many critics that Hulme’s career was marked by an abrupt shift from his Bergsonian individualism of 1906–1912 to his conservativism of 1912–1917. This analysis was initiated by Wallace Martin, revised by Karen Csengeri and addressed influentially by Levenson.37 The latter, in particular, makes this switch a hallmark not only of Hulme’s work, but also of Anglo-American literary modernism as a whole. By dividing modernism into two stages, it is easier to salvage the former stage, to point at how modernism was dedicated to liberation before it espoused authority and order. The charge of inherent fascism, of a ‘clear and unbroken’ development from Imagism to Fascism, is defused by this attention to the

10

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

anti-authoritarian origins of the movement.38 Robert van Hallberg’s analysis in particular reflects this critical desire for a cordon sanitaire, to split off early modernism in this way, redeeming a movement long condemned for its protofascism by revealing its original character, its pursuit of liberty.39 As indicated, this study attempts to correct some of these arguments. However, despite its arbitrariness, this familiar map of modernism provides the default position against which the current study can argue, an analytical baseline against which we can measure further refinement. The struggle to form ‘composite portraits’ of modernism is perhaps clearest in generalized statements regarding collective enterprises, such as the little magazines in which modernism first flourished. Hulme, Pound, Eliot and many of their contemporaries all set out their versions of modernism in periodicals ranging from small coterie papers to well-known political weeklies. Scholarship has taken an increasing interest in these venues in which canonical texts first appeared within a rich discourse of aesthetics, politics and philosophy.40 In radical journals like the Egoist and the New Age, aesthetic innovation was supported through a self-conscious ambition to remould every dimension of politics and culture as an integrated project. Moreover, this project to design a new world defined its method in opposition to dogmatic absolutism, optimistically elevating the art of debate and controversy, resulting in a complex mixture of ideas relating art, literature, philosophy, politics, all in a state of flux, their allegiances and implications all to play for within an open field of debate. Thus, we have what Suzanne Churchill calls the ‘muddle of modernism’, prior to its canonization and the imposition of narratives: a week-by-week contestation of concepts and the implications of their juxtaposition and relations.41 Hulme’s thinking is not simply or easily identifiable with that of the New Age. Within the journal, there were clear subgroups, often overlapping, sometimes antagonistic, at other times interactive. The New Age’s distinct, self-identified factions included the radical right (including the writers Anthony Ludovici, J. M. Kennedy and Oscar Levy), the Catholic right (G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc), social-realist writers (George Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett), ‘neorealist’ modern artists (Walter Sickert and Charles Ginner) and the literary and artistic avant-garde (Pound, Hulme and Wyndham Lewis). Orage not only gave these groups room to promote their view, but also challenged or praised them in view of their compatibility with his Guild Socialist position (the aesthetic implications of which were elaborated notably by Orage, Beatrice Hastings and Ramiro de Maeztu). Such interactions have been described in various ways – as a Platonic dialogue, as a Bakhtinian ‘dialogic’ and as a case study in

Introduction

11

Jurgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere.42 Other critics have developed further distinctions between ‘inter-’ and ‘intra-public’ discourse, ‘periodical communities’ or ‘periodical networks’, and provided useful metaphors for a community that thrived on conflict: half ‘battlefield’, half ‘party’.43 Despite framing her recent discussions of the New Age in such terms, thus drawing attention to the journal’s multivocal discourse, Ann Ardis maintains that the New Age’s core ideology bars it from consideration as a ‘modernist’ magazine. To make this case, she cites the journal’s hostility towards Ezra Pound, Imagism and Vorticism between 1913 and 1915. While Ardis sheds light on the heterogeneity of ideas surrounding modernism prior to its institutionalization in the 1940s and 50s, her conclusion that the New Age was opposed to modernist writing seems to relapse into the essentializing tendency that North urges us to avoid.44 Ardis’s sense of how the New Age operated in ‘a public sphere that was, even by 1907, segmenting into multiple, and complexly interrelated, counterpublics’ is surely more profitable than her rhetorical return to the unitary notion of ‘modernism’.45 It is surprising that she then develops an essentialist argument pitting Hulme, Pound and ‘modernism’ against Orage. Indeed, Pound was on the receiving end of some harsh criticism from socialists who saw his work as pretentiously detached from social realities. Yet Pound’s modernism was not identical with Hulme’s. Even leaving aside Pound’s later agreement with Orage on economic matters, Hulme’s relationship with Orage requires a study of its own as a notable element of the modernist project, reflecting larger patterns of collaboration between the radical left and right across Europe.

‘Heuristic devices’ Ardis’s attempt to draw distinctions is perhaps inevitable: the critic is compelled to seek some kind of structure to make sense of the New Age’s dense, weekly discourse. A frame is required: to use Hulme’s phrase, ‘a chessboard’ must be imposed upon this chaotic ‘cinder heap’.46 However, it is possible to refine the process, to keep in view both the mess beneath and the grid simultaneously. It is possible to make use of the intermediate veil of concepts and language as a mapping device, while recognizing it as a tool, not as truth itself. Like Hulme, the historian can acknowledge that the geometry of conceptualization is habitual, indeed intrinsic to human understanding, while declining to rely on it as a pure, unmitigated process. Thus Roger Griffin’s study of Modernism and Fascism (2007) announces his provisional use of

12

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

‘ideal-types’, defining ‘modernism’ as an overarching genus of ‘palingenetic’ discourse, evident not only in fascism, but in forms of socialism, communism, even liberalism, and also in a vast range of cultural activities which took energy from the notion of rebirth.47 Clearly, this encompasses much of the content published in the New Age, whose title and editorial interest exemplifies such a ‘palingenetic’ rhetoric.48 Griffin’s definitions are presented as ‘heuristic devices’, rather than rigid, empirical truths, and as such they can serve scholars well – as Mark Antliff has shown in recent work that combines art historical detail with Griffin’s overarching theory.49 Another method applied by Griffin in his analyses of modernist ideology is that of Michael Freeden.50 Freeden suggests that ideologies are not consistent things but clusters of various ‘component’ ideas, which evolve, bond and separate over time.51 There are two dimensions to this process: first, concepts are ‘decontested’ in different ways, and second, they are arranged within their different ‘ideas-environments’. To treat these ideologies as fixed entities is a mistake. Freeden’s account of ideology as a cluster of impermanent and permanent parts has already been applied to the New Age’s ideological discourse by Marc Stears, and this may be a helpful addition to the theoretical tools marshalled by literary critics exploring the journal’s cultural allegiances.52 It also seems very resonant with Hulme’s assault on fixed meanings that degenerate into cliché, on ideological categories that over time become fixed in the public mind and need ‘violent’ separation, what Georges Sorel calls ‘diremption’.53 Freeden relies partly on Wittgenstein’s theory of ‘family resemblances’, and this idea is also useful for the purposes of analysing the movement known as modernism.54 There are many kinds of modernism, each of which has some continuity and shared part with its immediately contiguous neighbours. However, similarities between even relatively close family members may be difficult to discern. Concepts are not united by a single common defining feature, but by a complex network of overlapping and criss-crossing similarities. This theory is particularly appealing to the purposes of this study, which, following Hulme’s lead, returns frequently to expose the fabricated and temporary concepts and terms used by artists to define their own work, and by critics to locate that work within a larger canon. Thus, we can get a more precise picture of the ‘surprising rhetorical collusions and alliances’ of Edwardian politics, sharpening a picture suggested by Levenson’s juxtaposition of Hulme with the radical individualism of Pound and The Egoist, by David Kadlec’s similar association of Pound and Syndicalism, or by Lee Garver’s perception of Hulme’s ‘rhetorical affinities’ with the suffragette

Introduction

13

movement and the Trade Union movement.55 This allows us to avoid making the unlikely claim that Hulme was a Stirnerian, a Syndicalist or a Guild Socialist. He clearly was not. But, he did share component ideas that occurred in Stirner’s, Sorel’s and Orage’s writing. The component idea, which, indeed, made the latter two writers distinctive, was their sense of myth in politics. Noting the echoes between Hulme and Orage, some previous studies, for example those by Tom Gibbons, Charles Ferrall and Tom Villis, identify, or suggest the identification, of the latter, an avowed socialist, with a movement towards fascism.56 Others try to identify Hulme with the left as represented by Orage.57 In contrast, Freeden’s method allows us to see the shared genetic make-up of Hulme and Orage’s ‘clusters of ideas’, which do not require either party’s reclassification, as their core attributes remain those of their declared ideologies. Similarly, this sheds light on the relation of Hulme to the radical right in France, including the Neo-Royalists Charles Maurras and Pierre Lasserre of Action française, as well as British Nietzscheans like Ludovici and Kennedy. Clearly, these writers shared a dislike of liberalism in the modern period and identified themselves as ‘classicists’ fighting against ‘romanticism’. They differ, however, in many significant ways: the ideas of ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’ are ‘essentially contested concepts’, with different meanings.58 The polysemy of these terms must be registered to grasp the Hulme’s collaboration with Orage, whom historians too often presume he would have opposed, and his dislike of the radical right Nietzscheans. It explains the intensity of his reaction to Bloomsbury, who apparently shared his taste for primitive art on similar grounds; it explains his objections to Bertrand Russell and his friendship with the Catholic conservative Ramiro de Maeztu. This method is applicable to specifically aesthetic debates about poetry and art. Hulme’s relations to Pound, Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, as well as to Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Walter Sickert, Charles Ginner, and to Maeztu and Russell are all similar, in that there are element ideas which are shared. The aim of this book is not only to provide a close specific case study of Hulme himself at each stage of his career, but also to locate this cluster of ideas in context with those of his closest contemporaries. The narrative of Hulme’s evolution takes in the ‘revolt against positivism’, the poetic movement known as ‘Imagism’ and Bergsonian philosophy, with their political subtext of individualist liberation, followed, with no sudden rupture in his thought, by the rearrangement of ideas to combine a belief in individualist liberation with a belief in the need for order, for a fixed social system. Hulme saw that historical narratives worked by categorising phenomena through likeness, and then converting these metaphoric links into rigid

14

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

intellectual codes. He took delight in disrupting such conceptual structures, not least by defying the social expectations of his immediate milieu. His involvement in various groupings – the Discord Club, the Poets’ Club, the Secession Club and the Imagist movement itself – is marked by a pleasure in conflict as much as collaboration, calling to mind the forms of tense unity and clashing images he recommended in politics and poetry, respectively. Indeed, modernism’s social formation out of the radical circles of Edwardian London seems to defy summation: it would test any Victorian ethnographer to extract a composite portrait of the ‘School of Images’, that strange family of Irish nationalists, New Women, city bankers, American bohemians and post office clerks in which Hulme first participated.59 Hulme would have taken pleasure in such unlikely juxtapositions, which he cultivated in his personal self-presentation, as much as in his poetics. What these clashing images represent is an attempt to maintain a uniqueness of individual expression while accepting the need for communication and social union, something that depends on the recognition of objective laws. Hulme seeks a balancing act between particulars and universals, between highly specific personal impressions and their communication through an appeal to other people’s similar experience. This occurs in his poetics through the use of precise metaphor. Later, in his art criticism, it recurs in his appreciation of a tension, best achieved in Jacob Epstein’s sculpture and David Bomberg’s painting, between degrees of representation and a geometric, abstracting formalism. These aesthetic interests accompany and illustrate an emerging, finely drawn political goal of expressive freedom guaranteed by an objective and communal law. It is in this movement towards an individualism united with a conservative theory of ethics that his position overlapped with that of Orage and the New Age. This politics has links to the pragmatic school of philosophy, as seen in the double usage of the word ‘pluralist’, in James’s philosophy and in modern political discourse to refer to the distribution of power between smaller, autonomous bodies united within one state. Patricia Rae has described the ‘pragmatic’ basis of Hulme’s ideas regarding poetry and art.60 The present study connects these aesthetic theories to a similarly pragmatic ideology or ethics.

Pluralism, religion, agonistic liberalism Hulme sketches a way of accommodating plural realities within a society united through a sense of theological order. He recognized that, in order for the social crucible of Christianity to function, there needed to be an absolute

Introduction

15

divide between temporal and religious law. The former was a matter of human invention, a play of pragmatic fictions, but the latter demanded greater commitment, a leap of faith.61 In this decision to subordinate his relentlessly deconstructive intellect to a non-rational, unquestioning belief in God, Hulme distinguished himself from his Nietzschean and Stirnerian comrades. He chose this path following close study of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, alongside the ‘NeoRealist’ moral theory of G. E. Moore and Edmund Husserl. A consideration of these influences ends this study, contextualizing the ideology of Hulme’s last years within a larger phenomenon of a Christian revival within the modern movement. It is worth noting here that the term ‘modernism’ gained a cultural meaning only after its initial use in theological circles. In 1907, the Pope condemned forms of doctrinal liberalism, which he named in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis as ‘modernism’: ‘the synthesis of all heresies’.62 Hulme’s place in this field is complex. Initially drawn to Bergson, whose work was frequently identified with theological modernists like Maurice Blondel and Édouard Le Roy, Hulme seemed at first to write within a field of vitalists and spiritualist liberals – a heretical sphere of pantheistic, monistic speculation that brought the religious and immanent (including political) spheres together.63 It became clear, however, that this confusion of transcendent and temporal realms repulsed him, and he restated his admiration for Bergson within carefully drawn limits, embedding his vitalist psychology within a larger theological framework. In later work, Hulme made explicit his hostility to theological modernism and its blurring of doctrine – rather, he insisted on dogmatic precision, founded on clear boundaries, reinforced by faith.64 Like Jacques Maritain, Hulme withdrew from philosophical vitalism, gravitating towards Christian orthodoxy. His appreciation of Pascal allowed him to maintain a certain vitalism which was acceptable to Christian dogma; another version of this compromise involved a restatement of the Thomist distinction between faith and reason, accommodating traces of Bergsonism within the former category. Hulme then was a cultural modernist, but theologically anti-modernist. Objecting to the misuse of religious rhetoric within secular politics, he aligned himself with a school of avant-garde writers who were religiously conservative. Although seemingly anti-progressive, Hulme’s insistence on human incomprehension of the divine distinguished his ideology from an emerging totalitarian politics that played fast and loose with theological forms and language, blurring religious and temporal spheres – a tactic made clear by later influential analyses of totalitarian ideologies as ‘political religions’.65

16

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

The Christian turn within cultural modernism has received new attention in recent years.66 This study contributes to this field by showing how Hulme expressed the desire to separate the earthly and the divine, to admit the limits of human knowledge and to submit to a faith in a higher, unknowable power. His politics were anti-utopian and rejected the idea of a will to power. Thus, Hulme’s excursus through modern thought led back towards a kind of moderation. Of particular interest here is Orage’s similar phase of gravitation towards religious conformity, which earned him the respect of his friend G. K. Chesterton, perhaps the exemplar of the Edwardian struggle to reconcile religious and modern thought.67 Hulme’s objections to ‘spilt religion’ not only foreshadow influential critiques of some disingenuous forms of secularism,68 but also anticipate a post-war series of anti-utopian texts, written in view of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, including Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics (1962) and Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958). The latter’s recommendation of a pluralist society constructed knowingly from the ‘crooked timber of humanity’, founded on an ‘uneasy equilibrium’ between competing values, has a particular resonance.69 Hulme’s place in this lineage is recognized by the contemporary philosopher John Gray, who cites Hulme in his recent proposals for an ‘agonistic liberalism’ – a term coined by Gray to describe Berlin’s worldview.70 Within the Marxist tradition Chantal Mouffe makes a similar point, drawing a distinction between ‘antagonistic’ and ‘agonistic’ pluralisms, and invoking Sorel as an example of the former who could be re-read to support the latter.71 Another representative of ‘agonism’, William Connolly, proposes a ‘bicameral’ liberalism and, noting the impoverishment of liberal culture through enforced secularism, urges an acceptance of multiplicity of faiths. He cites William James and Henri Bergson in outlining a pluralist system in which competing values are continually bubbling to the surface of the fluid, intuitive mind. Connolly’s pluralism, based as it is on close reference to James’s Pluralistic Universe (1909), and Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889), is perhaps the clearest case of an intellectual lineage that contains Hulme.72 Recent scholarship has noted such contemporary debts to Hulme, and it is the final suggestion of this study that the peculiar DNA of Hulme’s work has a place, as recognized by Gray particularly, within the genetics of British democracy – that at least some of its conceptual components have been utilized to protective effect, warding off the fever of utopianism that has so often wreaked destruction

Introduction

17

in European history particularly.73 The place of this intellectual gene within the mainstream Anglo-American democratic tradition does, in fact, precede Hulme’s contribution; as he noted himself, it is perhaps exemplified by the American constitution, through which powers are carefully divided and controlled. At the end of his life, Hulme was a defender of a pluralist democracy, a principle for which he was willing, paradoxically, to fight.74 A similar British tradition of value pluralism is one possible end-point of the Hulmean project, despite the exotic formulations through which its author moved before his speculations were cut so abruptly short. The study begins by recounting Hulme’s responses to the ‘revolt against positivism’ and his role in the formation of the politicized poetics of Imagism. Chapter 1 traces Hulme’s rejection of philosophical systems, both Idealist and positivist; his simultaneous attraction to forms of nominalism and realism; and his refinement of the principle of the image in poetry through readings in psychology and French Symbolism, which inflected his work with a radical individualism then rife in the Parisian avant-garde, as well as explaining his attraction to Guild Socialist and anarchist circles in London. Chapter 2 analyses Hulme’s relation to the New Age, as a complement to the usual histories of Imagism at the Egoist. I seek to challenge the received idea that Hulme and Orage were naturally opposed ideologically – but rather than elide their positions, claiming Hulme as a socialist or Orage as a Tory, I identify their resemblances as partial, but significant, residing in a similar ethical position, a form of pragmatism. In Chapter 3, I apply the same method to suggest that Hulme’s interest in the Action française group was more a matter of styling and rhetoric, and that deeper philosophical differences divided them. Hulme’s conservatism was paradoxically founded on a ‘pluralistic’ attitude to philosophy, and a belief in the political potency of non-rational forms of cognition. Moreover, it was accompanied by an enthusiasm for experimental art and literature. All these positions were viewed with suspicion by Maurras and Lasserre, intellectual leaders of Action française. I also develop my account of Orage and Hulme’s alliance, which separated them from other British ‘classicists’ in avant-garde circles, for example, Ludovici and Kennedy, who moved more frankly towards the extreme right. Chapter 4 extends the method to take in the New Age debate about art from 1913 to 1914, again distinguishing between the ideological clusters unique to Hulme, Lewis, Pound, Sickert, Ginner, Fry and Bell, and the source philosophies of Wilhelm Worringer, Theodor Lipps and the German theorists of ‘empathy’. Chapter 5 continues this method, now dealing with Georges Sorel, Maeztu and Orage. The study concludes by

18

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

suggesting that Hulme’s ideas were pragmatic and religious in orientation, and gravitated towards more moderate ideological conclusions than those of certain contemporaries who later promoted forms of fascism.

Notes See for example Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Robert Van Hallberg, ‘Libertarian Imagism’, Modernism/Modernity, 2.2 (1995), 63–79; and Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and David Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Other examples are cited throughout this thesis. 2 For identifications of Hulme with the extreme right, see Tom Gibbons, ‘Modernism and Reactionary Politics’, Journal of Modern Literature, 3.5 (1973), 1140–57; Charles Ferrall, Modernist Literature and Reactionary Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), among others. More recently, Levenson has associated Hulme with anarchist currents in modernism, currents explored in Clarke, Dora Marsden, Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, Hallberg, ‘Libertarian Modernism’, and in forthcoming work by Antliff. 3 For details of Hulme’s early life, see Robert Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T.E. Hulme (London: Allen Lane, 2002). 4 See Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 1893–1923 (Aldershot: Scolar Press 1990) for an account of Orage’s ‘provincial avant-garde’. 5 The classic account of this period is George Dangerfield’s Strange Death of Liberal England (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1935). 6 For fuller details of Orage’s background and the New Age, see Chapter 2. 7 For a vivid account of the social worlds of the London avant-garde, see Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). 8 The term ‘revolt against positivism’ was used influentially by H. Stuart Hughes in Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959). 9 Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 4. 10 This term was coined by William James in The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols (1890; New York: Dover Publications, 1950), I, 239. 1

Introduction

19

11 Schwartz, Matrix, pp. 20–21, 44–45, 47–48. 12 T. E. Hulme, ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 49–56 (p. 54). Future references to the Collected Writings will use the abbreviation CW. 13 Ronald Bush, ‘Modernist Poetry and Poetics’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 232–50 (p. 232). 14 Ezra Pound, ‘Pastiche: the Regional XIV’, NA, 25.26 (23 October 1919), 432. Quoted by Bush in ‘Modernist Poetry and Poetics’, p. 232. F. S. Flint made a similar point in ‘Verse’, NA, 6.10 (6 January 1910), 233–34 (p. 234). 15 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), pp. 3–22; Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 52–53. 16 Bush, ‘Modernist Poetry and Poetics’, p. 232. See also George A. Kubler, A New History of Stereotyping (New York: Little & Ives, 1941), pp. 23–71. 17 Bush, ‘Modernist Poetry’, p. 233. 18 On radical objections to liberal reform, see Tom Villis, Reaction and the AvantGarde: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 41–71. 19 See Anne Fernihough, ‘Go in Fear of Abstractions: Modernism and the Spectre of Democracy’, Textual Practice, 14.3 (2000), 479–97 (488–89). The ‘general will’ was defined and advocated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1791) ed. by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 50, 121–22. Anxieties regarding the ‘tyranny of the majority’ are apparent in writing by Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocquville and John Stuart Mill, and in the crowd psychology of Hippolyte Taine and Gustave Le Bon. See Chapter 4. 20 See, for example, William Chace, The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973); Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989); Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); and Kenneth Asher, T.S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 21 Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 111–18; and William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 93–100. 22 North, Political Aesthetic, pp. 15, 16. 23 See David McClennan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969); and The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. by Lawrence Stepelevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

20

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

24 For the impact of German philosophy on British political discourse, see Sandra M. den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 10–51; for its impact on the literary sphere, see Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 25 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 25. 26 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), p. 140. 27 This tendency in historiography is exemplified by works such as Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); and Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; New York: Pantheon, 1972). For an accessible account, see Callum Brown, Post-Modernism for Historians (Harlow: Pearson and Longman, 2005). 28 Roger Griffin provides an insightful summary of how post-modern historiographical issues pertain to histories of modernism in Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp. 34–39. 29 See David Bradshaw, ‘Introduction’, A Concise Companion to Modernism (Blackwell: Oxford, 2003), pp. 1–5 (p. 2). 30 See Chapter 1 for citations for, and a discussion of, Galton’s composite portraits in connection with Hulme’s theory of juxtaposed images (or ‘visual chords’) in poetry. 31 Mary Bouquet, ‘Family Trees and their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of London, n.s. 2 (March 1996), 43–66 (p. 62). 32 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 537–56 (p. 556). 33 Levenson, Genealogy, p. 79. 34 Clarke, Dora Marsden, pp. 4–5, and Hallberg, ‘Libertarian Imagism’, pp. 63–79. 35 T. E. Hulme, Speculations, ed. by Herbert Read (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1924). 36 This was the impression gained by Frank Kermode in Romantic Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 119–37. 37 Wallace Martin, ‘New Age’ under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), p. 172; Karen Csengeri, ‘The Intellectual Development of T. E. Hulme’, ELT, 32.1 (1989), 7–25; and Levenson, Genealogy, pp. 37–74, 80–93.

Introduction

21

38 ‘The development from Imagism in poetry to Fascism in politics is clear and unbroken.’ Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), p. 99. 39 Hallberg, ‘Libertarian Imagism’, p. 77. 40 Along with the aforementioned studies by Clarke and Hallberg, see David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T.S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–28 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Ann Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict 1880–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine ‘Others’ and the Renovation of American Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, eds. Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Recent work has been galvanized by digital archives at the Modernist Journals Project (www.modjourn.org). For a comprehensive survey of British, American and European periodicals, see The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–2013). 41 Churchill, The Little Magazine ‘Others’, p. 222. Ardis cites Churchill’s phrase in ‘The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age’, Modernism/Modernity, 14.3 (2007) 407–34 (p. 433 n.84); and in ‘Democracy and Modernism: The New Age under A.R. Orage (1907–1922)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, pp. 205–25 (pp. 225). 42 Robert Scholes and Staff of the MJP, ‘General Introduction to The New Age, 1907–1922’, http://www.modjourn.org/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.001&view=mjp_ object; Ardis, ‘Dialogics of Modernism(s)’, pp. 406, 408, 416, 425, 428 n.12; ‘Democracy and Modernism’, pp. 215, 215 n.17, 219, 220, 222. 43 See Ardis, ‘Dialogics of Modernism(s)’, p. 416 for her use of Habermas’s theories, and Alan Golding, ‘The Dial, The Little Review, and the Dialogics of Modernism’, American Periodicals, 15.1 (2005), 42–55 (pp. 42, 43), for reference to Bakhtin. In ‘Democracy and Modernism’, pp. 219–20, Ardis refines her use of Habermas, citing Nancy Fraser’s definitions of ‘intra-public’ and ‘inter-public’ spheres and ‘subaltern counter-public spheres’. These terms were earlier used by Mark Morrisson in The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2000), pp. 9, 84–132. The term ‘periodical community’, deriving from Lucy Delap, ‘Feminist and Anti-feminist Encounters in Edwardian Britain’, Historical Research, 78.201 (August 2005), 388, 393–98;

22

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

and ‘The Freewoman, Periodical Communities, and the Feminist Reading Public’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 61 (2000), 265, is comparable to Jason Harding’s reference to ‘periodical networks’ in The Criterion, p. 3. The ‘battlefield’ and ‘party’ metaphors are taken from Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible, ‘Introduction’, Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, eds. Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 1–18 (pp. 11, 13–14). 44 The paradox of trying to broaden the notion of ‘modernism’, as Jennifer Wicke has observed, is that to draw a contrast, one must acknowledge the original premise (‘Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble’, Modernism/Modernity, 8.3 (2001), 389–403 (pp. 394–95). Ardis sets modernist texts back within the ‘muddle’ of various counterpublic spheres, but then reverts to the story of how modernism set itself apart from other spheres, a preliminary stage for its academic institutionalization. 45 Ardis, ‘The Dialogics of Modernism(s)’, p. 407. 46 T. E. Hulme, ‘The New Philosophy’, NA, 5.10 (1 July 1909), 198–99 (p. 198); CW, pp. 85–88 (p. 86). See Richard Cork, David Bomberg (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 50. 47 Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 4–6, 34–39, 43–69. 48 Griffin notes this in Modernism and Fascism, p. 135. See Paul Jackson, Great War Modernisms and ‘The New Age’ Magazine (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). for a thorough account of the New Age using Griffin’s methodology. 49 Griffin elaborates on the use of ‘heuristic devices’ in ‘Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism: a “Mazeway Resynthesis”, Modernism/Modernity, 15.1 (2008), 9–24, esp. p. 10. Mark Antliff considers its application to art history in ‘Fascism, Modernism and Modernity’, Art Bulletin, 84.1 (March 2002), 148–69. 50 Griffin echoes Freeden in his description of ideologies as a series of Venn diagrams in Chapter Two of Modernism and Fascism, 43–69, esp. p. 52. He cites him directly in two articles: ‘Cloister or Cluster? The Implications of Emilio Gentile’s Ecumenical Theory of Political Religion for the Study of Extremism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6.1 (2005), 33–52; and ‘The Post-Fascism of the Alleanza Nazionale: a Case-Study in Ideological Morphology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 1.2 (1996), 123–45. 51 Michael Freeden, ‘Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 2.2 (1994), 140–64; Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 52 Marc Stears, ‘Guild Socialism and Ideological Diversity on the British Left, 1914– 1926’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 3.3 (1998), 289–305. 53 Thomas Grattan [T. E. Hulme], ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion III’, The Commentator, 2 (8 March 1911), 266–67 (p. 266); CW, pp. 210–13 (p. 210); T. E. Hulme, ‘Translator’s Preface to Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence’, CW,

Introduction

54 55

56

57 58 59

60 61 62

63

64

23

pp. 246–52 (pp. 248); and Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1907), ed. by Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. xii, 263, 268. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), sections 65–88, pp. 32–33. See Levenson, Genealogy, Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, and, for both phrases quoted here, Lee Garver, ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’, T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 133–47 (p. 140). See also Garver, ‘Lost Politics: The New Age and the Edwardian Socialist roots of British Modernism’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Chicago, 2001), pp. 103–30. Tom Gibbons, ‘Modernism and Reactionary Politics’, Journal of Modern Literature, 3.5 (1973), 1140–57, and Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas, 1880–1920 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia, 1973); Charles Ferrall, ‘The New Age and the Emergence of Reactionary Modernism before the Great War’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38 (1992), 653–70; and Modernist Literature and Reactionary Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 13–20; Villis, Reaction and the Avant-Garde, p. 3. Garver, ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’, pp. 134, 137–38, 141–42, 145–46; and ‘Lost Politics’, pp. 103–30. Freeden borrows this term from W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1955–1956), 167–98. This term denotes the group that met at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel during 1909, so named by Ezra Pound in his introduction to Hulme’s poems in his ‘Prefatory Note’ to ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’, in Ripostes (London: Stephen Swift, 1912), pp. 58–59 (p. 59). For profiles of each member, see Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), pp. 131–203. Patricia Rae, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997), pp. 45–77. See Chapter 5 for a detailed account of this argument, which Hulme made between 1914 and 1916. For a detailed account of theological modernism in the Catholic Church, see Darrell Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See my chapter entitled ‘Modernist Anti-Modernists’ in Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse ed. by Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman and David Addyman (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 80–96, for a fuller account of this relationship. See Chapters 3 and 5, and Mead, ‘Modernist Anti-Modernists’ for a more detailed account of this positioning.

24

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

65 For an account of the phenomenon of, and the history of scholarship on, political religion, see Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 66 See for example Griffin, Modernism and Fascism; Erik Tonning, Modernism and Chrsitianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2014); Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); and Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 67 See Chapter 2 for Chesterton’s comments on Orage. 68 For example in Modernism and Christianity Tonning draws connections between modernist religious orthodoxy and the contemporary critique of secularism known as ‘Radical Orthodoxy’, and its affiliations to forms of communitarian Toryism that recalls Chesterton’s emphasis on human fallibility particularly. See John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (eds), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999). 69 Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990; London: Pimlico, 2013), pp. 50, 20; Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945); and Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962). 70 John Gray, Isaiah Berlin (London: Harper Collins, 1995), pp. 1–4. 71 See Chantal Mouffe, ‘Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism?’, Social Research 66.3 (Fall 1999), 745–58. 72 William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham: Duke University, 2005). 73 See my article, ‘T. E. Hulme, Bergson, and the New Philosophy’, European Journal of English Studies, 12.3 (December 2008), 245–60 for a fuller discussion. John Gray has since discussed Hulme’s work in The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (London: Allen Lane, 2013), pp. 131–8. 74 He writes admiringly of American democracy in ‘On Progress and Democracy’, Commentator 3 (2 August 1911), 165–66, CW, p. 221. He declares his commitment to democracy in his ‘Preface to Sorel’s Reflections on Violence’, CW, p. 251 n.h., and his willingness to fight for it in ‘War Notes VII’, NA, 18.8 (23 December 1915), 173–74; CW, p. 362.

1

The Discord Club

Much has been said regarding the anarchist tendency of early modernism, but Hulme has yet to be considered centrally in this light.1 The present work adds a detailed genealogy of this tendency in his work, showing how he sought an intensity of personal expression that resonated with libertarian rhetoric. Hulme described an embodied aesthetic, wary of abstraction, stressing the immanence and tangibility of the individual subject. But if this notion chimed with radical individualist discourse, it was notably complicated by an underlying desire for order: Hulme’s anarchist energy was almost immediately accompanied by a resurgent conservative impulse. This paradoxical synthesis, although remarkably prevalent in Hulme’s work, is in fact reflective of a wider pattern, occurring across the work of several French and British contemporaries. The distinction between anarchist ‘early modernism’ and conservative ‘high modernism’, employed by Michael Levenson among others, fails to register how these two facets of modernist ideology occur together, not consecutively.2 Hulme’s earliest philosophical ideas were forged during a tumultuous period in his personal life. Having excelled in mathematics and science at school, in 1902, he won an Exhibition to St John’s College, Cambridge, to take the Mathematics Tripos, a celebrated examination in abstract thinking and a gold standard in academic achievement since the mid-nineteenth century.3 Predicted to rank among the University’s top graduates or ‘wranglers’, Hulme soon lost interest in his studies and by 1903 had formed a riotous dining society, known as the Discord Club, which made a habit of causing public disruptions in the street and local theatres.4 He was rusticated in 1904 and, having been arrested for affray at the Boat Race weekend in London, was sent down. Moving to the capital, he briefly enrolled at University College London to study biology before abandoning his degree. In July 1906, he went to Canada and travelled across the Western plains, working on railways and in lumberjack camps. He returned to London in Spring 1907 and, after a few weeks, went to Belgium for seven months to teach English and to perfect his French and German.5 The intellectual dimensions of Hulme’s early life can be partially reconstructed from his earliest

26

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

writings. This chapter focuses on his 1906–1907 notebooks and his 1908 ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’. It concludes by showing how with this literary theory came ideological affinities with the Parisian avant-garde, which Hulme adapted and shared with like-minded thinkers in London. Hulme’s early notes and later recollections show how his youthful passion for mathematics and the exact sciences tailed into disillusion with systems of all kinds.6 This scepticism regarding first principles and foundational beliefs is apparent throughout his early notebooks, known as ‘Cinders’ (1906) and ‘Notes on Language and Style’ (1907), which deal at length with the inherent superficiality of human reasoning. A central metaphor that recurs throughout his work is present immediately: he sees the world as a ‘cinder heap’, chaotic, without structure – and upon this chaos, our cognitive processes attempt to project systems: ‘the chess board’.7 Conceptualization through abstract language imposed artificial structures on a chaotic reality. When this structure is mistaken for a higher reality, we are misled into a false idealism, whether through abstract philosophic systems or the unspoken assumptions of verifiability underpinning modern science. In opposition to this, he asserted, ‘there is a difficulty in finding a comprehensive scheme of the cosmos, because there is none. The cosmos is only organised in parts; the rest is cinders’.8 None of these ideas is entirely new, as Hulme recognized. He believed it to be ‘impossible … to take up an absolutely new attitude towards the cosmos and its persistent problems’.9 His earliest philosophical stance is recognizably ‘a sort of nominalism’: a complicated engagement with the ancient ‘problem of universals’, which, unresolved as ever in the early twentieth century, was now re-staged in discussions of modern science and political philosophy.10 Originating in Plato, Aristotle and the medieval debate of Boethius, Ockham, Duns Scotus, Aquinas and Abelard, the question was whether words are merely convenient tags for groups of similar things (nominalism) or stand for higher essences, Platonic forms (realism).11 Thus, in ‘Cinders’ (1906), he wrote: There is a kind of gossamer web, woven between the real things, and by this means the 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; and in the midst of Hegelians who triumphantly explain the world as a mixture of ‘good’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’, this should be remembered.12

The Discord Club

27

Hulme’s more specific debt was to a distinctly modern restatement of this ancient idea, informed by evolutionary science. Observing the mental processes of animals, comparative psychologists explained human formulation of abstract ideas out of disparate sense impressions as driven by evolutionary priorities (in Hulme’s words, ‘by this means the animals communicate’).13 The treatment of mind as an evolved tool rather than a portal to higher truths had profound implications, casting doubt on the essential truth of higher conceptual structures. Faith in epistemologies that had underpinned Victorian liberal ideology – including scientific rationalism itself, as well as Idealist philosophy – was undermined by Darwin’s findings. Hulme’s image of a chessboard imposed upon an ash-heap captures this sense that cognitive systems, including both modern science and traditional metaphysics, were merely projections of the human mind, generated to meet a functional need – and that language itself inevitably tended towards such fictive system-building. A similar reductive materialism inspired forms of social nominalism – that is to say, the belief that individuals were artificially marshalled, to their detriment, into abstract communities and states. By the 1890s Nietzsche’s writing was gaining recognition across Europe, as were the rediscovered works of Max Stirner, a member of the Young Hegelian circle who had pushed Feuerbach’s nominalist re-reading of Hegel to an extreme censured even by Marx.14 These ideas inspired forms of fin de siècle anarchism with close links to the literary and artistic avant-garde. Early modernist writing has often been associated with the Stirnerian premise that ‘society’, its rules and codes are an abstraction, and the only reality lies in the individual’s sensibility and desires.15 Hulme’s recoil from rigid intellectual systems – in particular the scientific attitude that he called the ‘nightmare of determinism’ – may similarly explain his rebellious behaviour in the early 1900s; what Paul Edwards has called ‘an extraordinary anarchist gesture against the complacencies of the rule-bound order – the system of codes – that constituted Edwardian bourgeois society’.16 Yet, despite his apparent nominalism, Hulme’s writing does not wholly exorcize a yearning for communicable truths. His attacks on ‘higher truths’ are interspersed by gestures towards authenticity – at first, in the form of artistic vision, of epiphanic snatches of meaning, and later, in an increasingly religious rhetoric. Critics have long noted these tensions in Hulme’s thinking and ascribed them to a failure in his logic.17 On first glance, Hulme’s objections to ‘Romanticism’ seem at odds with his pursuit of glimpsed visions of truth in art, a mode outwardly reminiscent of the transcendental ‘symbol’ of Romantic aesthetics. However, the present study adds to a growing literature that credits

28

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Hulme’s thought with an overall consistency, ultimately identifying his position with a form of pragmatism (see Chapter 2). Although Hulme does seek moments of forceful insight, he insists on rooting them in the phenomenal world, in collisions of sense data and memory, driven together by emotional or unconscious forces, the power of which provides a consoling sense – though not a certainty – of pattern and significance in a chaotic world. Although by no means straightforwardly ‘realist’, Hulme’s early notebooks do reveal a longing for some shared condition of being, some kind of conceptual union. This dream of communication – of community – however fragile and inadequately shored up, anticipates Hulme’s belief in the value of social order as a crucible in which to refine the individual consciousness. This intermixture of intense subjectivity and a desire to convey permanent truths is characteristic both of Hulme’s ‘tensional aesthetic’, as Rae has described it, and his equally ‘tensional’ politics.18 The oscillation between an apparent anarchism and a desire to bring isolated persons together under one conceptual system anticipates Hulme’s movement towards a pluralist politics – a politics of conflict, seeking to reconcile the one and the many. The name of his riotous dining society, the Discord Club, encapsulates this paradoxical desire both to shatter conventions and to bind individuals into a collective unity.

Language and style Hulme’s literary theory begins with the belief that language, although instrumental in the abstract constructions of rationalism, can also have a redemptive, creative function. This premise was the focus of Hulme’s second notebook, ‘Notes on Language and Style’, which emphasized the role of language as a ‘large and clumsy instrument’, but one which can be brought to its most effective form through the metaphoric association of disparate things. ‘Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images […]. Language is only a more or less feeble way of doing this.’19 Concepts arise from first-hand experience, but ‘[w]e replace meaning (i.e. vision) by words. These words fall into well-known patterns, i.e. into certain well-known phrases which we accept without thinking of their meaning, just as we do the x in algebra.’20 Conversely, language could, with care, be marshalled to achieve a degree of

The Discord Club

29

genuine expression and description, since ‘[a]ll emotion depends on real solid vision or sound. It is physical’21: With perfect style, the solid leather for reading, each sentence should be a lump, a piece of clay, a vision seen; rather, a wall touched with soft fingers. […] Never should one feel light vaporous bridges between one solid sense and another. No bridges – all solid: then never exasperated.22 The demand for clear, logical expression is impossible, as it would confine us to the use of flat counter-images only.23

Hulme’s method was to push against the boundaries of language, seeking to convey the immediacy of experience rather than the abstract ideas formed out of it. He identifies ‘modern prose’ with ‘the type of reasoning [that] arrang[es] counters on the flat, where they can be moved about, without the mind having to think in any involved way.’ This is ‘the ideal of modern prose … to be all counters … to pass to conclusions without thinking’. In contrast, he describes a ‘Visual Poetry’, in which ‘each word must be an image seen, not a counter’.24 His thinking turns towards literary style, and here we see his philosophical ideas cast in new terms, notably that of the ‘Image’. A new range of influences emerge in Hulme’s 1907 notebooks, which deal specifically with the question of literary style. In Belgium, Hulme had read widely in French poetry and critical discussions regarding the proper aims and possibilities of poetic language. These works included influential accounts of Symbolist style and the movement’s philosophical ethos in Gustave Kahn’s preface to his Premiers poèmes (1897), André Beaunier’s La Poésie nouvelle (1902) and Remy de Gourmont’s Le Problème du style (1902).25 Parisian literary discourse had a well-established ideological character, responding to the nineteenth-century struggle to define French national culture. Since 1870, overlapping circles of literary and political radicals had jibed against the Third Republic’s rationalistic, secular liberalism and loss of national direction, demanding personal liberty on one hand, while evincing nostalgia for a lost sense of order on the other. During the 1890s, Symbolist writers expressed sympathy with anarchist protests against the state, and the government responded by prosecuting literary writers for sedition.26 However, following the Dreyfus scandal and its complex, cross-ideological test of communal loyalties, there emerged, within the Symbolist school, an attraction towards nationalism and classicism.27 In absorbing Symbolist theory, Hulme was also absorbing a politics, and it corresponded to his philosophical mediation between nominalism and realism. He would formulate a literary aesthetic

30

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

closely related to strangely entwined currents of radical individualism and conservatism in both Paris and London.

The ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ In 1908, Hulme delivered his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ to the Poets’ Club in London. Scholarly debate over the dating of the lecture, now largely resolved, reflects certain tensions in the text.28 Apparent inconsistencies within the text should be accepted as signs, as early as 1908, of Hulme’s characteristic fusion of apparently antithetical ideas: a radical scepticism and a lingering desire for firmer truths. These correspond to an aesthetic polarity: on one hand, an attention to the flux of experience, and on the other, a desire to make transitory experience permanently legible. This tension was a knowing one, a balancing act between the chaos of sensory data and the desire to put into words, or definite forms, the fleeting moment. It is suggestive of an emerging, complex brand of politics, combining libertarian and communitarian impulses. What must be remembered is that Hulme is writing experimentally, combining ideas taken from several different sources, bringing conceptual ingredients into a subtle, perhaps explosive, new union. Reading his lecture, we must bear in mind its delivery as a provocative speech, and also its role as a sort of intellectual laboratory in which Hulme was attempting a new chemistry of ideas, with uncertain results. The lecture opens with an aggressive rejection of vague religious or spiritual terms, as Hulme takes aim at a ‘a reviewer writing in The Saturday Review’ who ‘spoke of poetry as the means by which the soul soared into higher regions, and as a means of expression by which it became merged into a higher kind of reality’ – the kind of statement that Hulme ‘utterly detest[s]’. He instead prefers ‘to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way in favour of materialistic explanation of poetry as a means of expression’.29 Thus, Hulme’s dislike of a certain strain of romanticism, that usually associated with his polemics of 1912, is apparent as early as 1908. Indeed, a desire for tactile certainties was present in ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’, which had also made clear that philosophic Idealism was, like deterministic science, objectionable in its assumption of a universal pattern.30 Hulme’s distinction between a romantic notion of poetic access to a ‘higher kind of reality’ and his own treatment of poetry as simply ‘a means of expression’ is the first instance of several cross-hatched polarities sketched in rapid succession: at their point of intersection can be found a rough model of Hulme’s embodied poetics.31

The Discord Club

31

In his lecture, he takes up a complex position, contrasting the two most prominent modern schools of French poetry, the Parnassians, the mid-century school known for their objectivity, self-control, and metrical and descriptive precision, and the fin-de-siècle Symbolist movement, known for ambiguous, free verse evocations of psychological – perhaps spiritual – states that otherwise are incommunicable. Although he seems to dismiss the former and pin his colours to the latter, Hulme admires qualities associated with both in his attempt to describe a new kind of poetry.32 Despite his commitment to ‘an extreme modernism’, we see he is attempting a synthesis of both the latest French school and its mid-century predecessor in the formulation of a new aesthetic. He thus first adduces the decline of the Parnassian school as an example of how ‘verse forms like manners and like individuals develop and die’.33 This metaphor was borrowed from the poet Kahn’s ‘Préface’ to his Premiers poèmes, but Hulme applies it within an approving paraphrase of the critic Beaunier’s study, La Poésie nouvelle, which vigorously promoted the Symbolist aesthetic. Accounts such as Beaunier’s provided Hulme with a basic map of French literary movements.34 To grasp Hulme’s negotiation between these styles, it is useful to recall how the impassive, highly controlled Parnassian aesthetic of the Second Empire spurned the Romantics’ flamboyant spirituality, preferring an attention to tactile detail inspired by the school of ‘positivism’ then dominating French intellectual life and exemplified by the critic, historian and psychologist Hippolyte Taine. Weighed down by its insistence on impersonal diction and polished metrics, this school lost momentum, giving way to the vers libre of the Decadent movement, later known as ‘Symbolism’. By the turn of the century, Symbolism was a broad church, a sample of whose major figures were introduced to Britain in Arthur Symons’s influential account, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). In fact, the Parnassian style, particularly that of Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et camées (1852), remained an influence on some currents of Symbolist and modernist writing. In particular, a commitment to a stylistic hardness and clarity had much in common with Imagism. Taine’s influence inspired the Parnassians’ ‘objective’ poetic, with self-expression subordinate to precision in figures of speech. Although in a later article Hulme identified Parnassian poetry with a deadening, atomistic psychology and rejected both in favour of a Bergsonian Symbolism, his admiration of tangible, ‘sculptural’ qualities in poetry invoked the spirit of Gautier in particular.35 Hulme’s attitude to the spirit of positivism was similarly complex: he, like Bergson, demurred at the analytical reductions of the scientific mind but, rather than rejecting

32

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

its methodology, pushed and refined it to achieve new sensitivity to life in its fullest intensity. Problematically, the Symbolist school – the modern movement best equipped, through its use of vers libre, to convey inner experience with the exactness that Hulme required – was by no means untouched by Romantic rhetoric, what Hulme called ‘hocus pocus’.36 Although Symbolism provides the model for his poetic ‘extreme modernism’, Hulme clearly rejected the Schopenhauerian and Wagnerian – generally German Idealist – inflections in its theoretical background.37 What proceeded was an adaptation of Symbolism that sought in it a new fidelity to subjective, preverbal experience while circumventing its Idealist tendencies.38 Thus, Hulme’s ‘Lecture’ makes no acknowledgement of the indistinct, religious character of much Symbolist poetry, as described in Symons’s influential account, as well as by Beaunier, but there is a recognition that vers libre conveys the poet’s inner life, like ‘clothes made to order, rather than ready-made clothes’.39 This poetry presents a record of individual thoughts, something that Hulme wants to retain while rejecting Idealism. It traces the movement of the mind in precise detail.40 Even then, there is a hint of Hulme’s unease with some aspects of Symbolism: he insists, briefly but significantly, that the poetry he seeks, as yet unnamed, is something new and different from French vers libre.41 Hulme’s ‘modernism’ is, then, distinct from Parnassianism in its attention to the inner life, but also from Symbolism in its avoidance of ‘hocus pocus’: it combines the materialism of the former with the individualism of the latter. Another seeming dissonance of ideas emerges as Hulme sets out his theory of the growth and decline of poetic form, borrowed from Kahn. Decadence here is associated with ‘softness’, ‘women wailing’ and ‘roses, roses all the way’.42 These phrases have been highlighted by Helen Carr as evidence of Hulme’s anti-romantic, ‘masculinist’ cultural politics.43 Yet, by identifying this trait as early as 1908, Carr draws attention to problems with the customary ‘parsing’ of Hulme’s work.44 Levenson holds that the lecture is typical of the initial, expressive, ‘individualist’ phase of modernism, yet we find in it already an assertion of the hard austerity usually linked to ‘high modernism’.45 It is more profitable, however, to ask whether some of the attributes of ‘classicism’ could have occurred together with the focus on expressive individualism at this early stage. Signs of anti-idealism in ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’ indicate this is most likely: Hulme’s scepticism regarding illusory symbols and abstract systems anticipates his lecture’s opening attack on Romantic belief systems. This combination of expressivism and anti-idealism is an early

The Discord Club

33

example of a persistent tension in Hulme’s aesthetic, foreshadowing his attempt, in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (1912), to combine a Bergsonian theory of intuition with a Maurrasian ‘classicism’. This paradox also helps understand Hulme’s shifting antagonisms. At a more prosaic level, it is Hulme’s patchwork of borrowings from Kahn and Beaunier that produces a superficial incoherence. However, the remarks he chooses to stitch together capture his particular, novel position – his dismissal of both Parnassian ‘sterility’ and the sentimental disorder of late Romanticism. As his accusations of ‘decadence’ are directed, without pause for redefinition, at both the formality of Parnassianism and the excessive emotion associated with Romanticism, we are led to imagine some kind of preferable alternative between the two extremes. To these polarities, Hulme adds another: modern poetry as opposed to ‘ancient’ art, for example, Egyptian pyramids and Greek epic poetry. Adapting an argument from the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, Hulme describes ancient art as pursuing immortality.46 The new opposition of ancient and modern re-presents the tension that Hulme has already described between the formal and expressive, being and becoming. The monumental forms of the ancient world are contrasted with a modern sensitivity to the ephemeral, identifiable for example with Whistler’s paintings.47 Although Hulme’s argument in favour of Impressionism over Formalism would be apparently reversed in his later commentaries on artists like David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein, this does not amount to a total change of position. As the ‘Lecture’ continues, we see a desire for ‘fixity’, the ‘arrest’ of impressions, in the rendering of impressions ‘like sculpture’, which prefigures this taste.48 While Hulme grew closer over time to admiring the ‘monumental’ in art, he was merely placing greater weight on qualities of stasis and hardness that he had always admired. Indeed, this development from a taste for Impressionist and expressivist work towards an admiration of abstract form was shared by several contemporary art critics.49 Hulme reinforces his position with a number of related distinctions: the new poetry works with musical phrases versus melodies; it deals in visual, not aural effects, and in particular it is identified with sculpture.50 Again, Hulme’s mosaic of borrowings combines principles from opposing schools: for example, the comparison of poetry and sculpture was previously used by Gautier, and his sculptural style is generally associated with the Parnassian movement.51 Indeed, it reinforces the vocabulary of ‘fixity’ that Hulme has used about his desired impressionism throughout, his taste for ‘gem-like’ precision paradoxically recalling the permanence he had associated with ancient art and dismissed.52

34

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Oppositions are thus established between Romanticism and materiality, religious vision and mere expression, Parnassian sterility and Symbolist vitality, feminine decadence and masculine renaissance, stories and images, musical melodies versus simple phrases. If some of these intersecting distinctions seem to annul one another, then it is because they encircle a form of poetry that was still not entirely defined and hint at a complex ideology that stood between the poles of anarchy and order. If Hulme is alert to the extravagance of Idealist metaphysics, instead demanding tangible detail, he also resists the suffocating impersonality of a purely objective empiricism. He pays scrupulous attention to individual perception and feeling but wants to communicate this through a hard formal clarity, a sculptural solidity. He envisages a poetry dedicated not only to individual vision but also to communicative discipline and power. It is the contention of the present study that this sketched aesthetic approximates a politics that sought not only to intensify individual sensibility but also to harness that intensity within an invigorated social order. Indeed, it is significant that the anarchist vogue among the febrile Parisian avant-garde was by 1910 clearly evolving, paradoxically, towards a taste for structure and clarity. This coincided with a conservative revival in France and a renewed taste for ‘classicism’ in politics as much as art. Always attentive to intellectual novelty, some Symbolists and Cubists, for example, Tancrède de Visan and Maurice Denis, turned their focus from Bergson, Stirner, Nietzsche and Bakunin to the Neo-Royalism of Action française and later to the Neo-Thomism of the Catholic Revival. Midway in this transition lay a curious synthesis: Mark Antliff had described how a swathe of literary, artistic and political thinkers drew on the rhetoric of Bergson and Charles Maurras simultaneously.53 Hulme’s implied desire for an individualist, expressive aesthetic together with formal hardness is as much a calling card of modernist aesthetics as either element alone; it is reminiscent of what Richard Shiff, writing of Cézanne and his admirers Maurice Denis and Roger Fry, calls a ‘spontaneous classicism’: a formalism invested with expressive feeling.54 As Tom Villis has pointed out, this was a cultural politics new to the British scene, and Hulme was at its vanguard.55 If the French avant-garde bred discontent with Third Republic liberalism, pushing both left and right against the limits of secular rationalism and demanding a new kind of personal freedom, then Hulme, delivering his lecture in London in 1908, was also pushing against a lacklustre liberalism prevailing not only in the arts but also in politics. While a pervasive liberal worldview had enervated radicals on both the left and

The Discord Club

35

right, similarly, the literary scene had grown to rely on late Victorian conventions of style, diction and metre. Hulme’s targets were philosophical and political, as well as poetic.

The image The key principle of Hulme’s aesthetic, the Image, crystallizes the tensions between realism and nominalism, empirical detail and abstract thought, discussed above. In doing so, it both borrows from and subverts a hierarchical notion of evolved intelligence promoted by positivist psychologists. Hulme’s balancing act here can only be fully appreciated by examining how the term ‘Image’ as deployed in fin de siècle psychology, and literary theory, was initially established in the nineteenth century by Francis Galton and T. H. Huxley, before recurring in work by the French psychologist Théodule Ribot and his colleague Henri Bergson. There is evidence to suggest that Hulme was directly influenced by Ribot and Bergson, but this chapter contends that the intellectual background to their terminology in Galton’s work especially is also deeply relevant to the politics of Hulme’s image. The contrast between Hulme’s ‘juxtaposition of distinct images’ and Galton’s famous ‘composite images’ points to his subversion of a liberal ideology fuelled by a hubristic positivism. Hulme’s early references to ‘the image’ establish a distinguishing feature of his subjective but anti-romantic, anti-decadent, poetry. Say the poet is moved by a certain landscape, he selects from that certain images which, put into juxtaposition in separate lines, serve to suggest and to evoke the state he feels. To this piling-up and juxtaposition of distinct images in different lines, one can find a fanciful analogy in music. A great revolution in music when, for the melody that is one-dimensional music, was substituted harmony which moves in two. Two visual images form what one may call a visual chord. They unite to suggest an image which is different to both.56

Later, he distinguishes between prose and poetry, identifying the latter with ‘images’: 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. The difference between the two is, roughly, this: that while one arrests your mind all the time with a picture, the other allows the mind to run along with the least possible effort to a conclusion.57

36

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

The distinction is made between abstraction and sensory experience, between the smooth movement of concepts as opposed to new, arresting combinations of images that convey real feeling. Bergson’s emphasis on intuitive, image-based thought over ratiocination is an obvious source here. It is well known that Bergson’s vitalism influenced a wide range of artistic practice. In Hulme’s case, Bergson offered Hulme a means to re-describe, in immanent, empirically based terms, forms of literary inspiration previously associated with a vaguely spiritual Idealism.58 But there is more to say about his context within a larger tradition of evolutionary psychology, itself laden with ideological significance. Several critics have emphasized the role of Théodule Ribot, a key figure in modern French psychology.59 Editor of the influential Revue Philosophique and professor at the Collège de France, Ribot, like his colleague Bergson, worked in the tradition of positivism but pushed at the limits of this science, seeking notably to explain forms of non-rational and creative activity, particularly in French poetry, in materialist terms. This admiration for an embodied aesthetic corresponds to an aversion to abstraction; Ribot’s work, like Bergson’s, thus seems to advance the case for forms of embodied, intuitive and creative consciousness. Hulme also absorbed this idea as presented in a radicalized form by Remy de Gourmont, drawing on Ribot together with Nietzsche. Martin, who was one of the first to pinpoint Ribot’s influence in Hulme’s writing, proposes that Hulme’s ‘juxtaposition’ of images, a poetic device to refresh one’s immediate perceptions of things, echoes Ribot’s account of mental evolution. This recounts the loss of mental imagery incurred in the transition from visual logic to a purely abstract verbal code and hints at the possibility of its reversal.60 In L’Évolution des idées générales (1897), Ribot discusses recent studies of conceptualization, emphasizing the prevailing theory that language becomes increasingly disconnected from concrete experience at the higher levels of mental abstraction. The main thesis is encapsulated in this description of sense impressions on the brink of conceptualization. The concept, an ‘abstraction’, is set in contrast with the ‘image’ – that is, the initial visual impression seen as the first building block of cognition: We have seen that abstraction, in proportion as it ascends and strengthens, separates itself more and more from the image, until finally, at the moment of pure symbolism, the separation becomes antagonism. This is because there is fundamentally, and from the outset, an opposition of nature and procedure between the two. The ideal of the image is an ever-growing complexity, the ideal of abstraction an ever-growing simplification, since the one is formed by addition, the other by subtraction.61

The Discord Club

37

Ribot’s suggestion that sensory impoverishment accompanies conceptualization resonates with Hulme’s abhorrence of abstraction. Moreover, at an intermediate point just prior to conceptualization, Ribot proposed, there lies the ‘logique des images’.62 This state, which animals, children and primitives inhabit unconsciously, remains present at the fringes of the adult, conceptualizing mind. This logic, utilizing ‘images génériques’, is, in evolutionary terms, subordinate to the fully conceptual mind, but it is more vivid. It is the closest the mind can come to recalling its initial encounter with things, before a process of rationalization has reduced them to schematic forms classified by likeness for the sake of convenience. The generic image is not a perfect recollection: although more real than the concept, it is not as real as the percept, or initial sense impression. It is a halfway point between the two, and although blurry and imperfect, it is rich in visual detail compared to the skeletal concept.63 This theory is often cited as the origins of the Imagist aesthetic. Indeed, Hulme’s poetics attempt to manipulate language to revive this ‘logic of images’ and thus regain the richness of immediate impressions. By borrowing from these psychological sources, Hulme was revealing his attraction to the methodology of positivism, especially in its attempts to describe creativity or spiritual experience in materialist terms. The empirical tradition still appealed to him, although he objected to its pretentions, its faith that a purely atomistic analysis could comfortably explicate all internal and external phenomena. It is thus revealing that the specific genealogy of Ribot’s ‘image’ leads intriguingly further back to leading British empiricist thinkers, channelling the very spirit which imbued Hulme’s intellectual world as a schoolboy and undergraduate.64 As Ribot points out in a footnote early in the L’Évolution des idées générales, the original source for his discussion of the ‘logic of images’ and the ‘generic image’ lies in several papers written by Francis Galton on his experiments in making composite images with superimposed photographs.65 Galton proposed that by compiling photographic portraits of family members, criminals or other social ‘types’ together, one could arrive at an abstract generic image, a visualized ‘ideal type’. The premise reveals the underlying ‘realism’ of Galtonian positivism, a kind of inverted Platonic faith that ideal forms could be found beneath the variety of sense experience.66 As such, it was a powerful visual proof for the Victorian disciplines of physiognomy and criminology, which often relied on a belief in biological and social archetypes. Thus, beneath the empirical – apparently nominalist – tradition lays a tendency towards an inverted realism. The composite portrait, in its anonymizing, generalizing force, was a powerful

38

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

emblem of the abstracting effect of late Victorian liberal democracy as decried by the likes of Stirner and Nietzsche. Its potency as a metaphor was recognized by Huxley, who used it to explain the associationist theory of concept formation in his memoir of David Hume (1878).67 Composite portraits made vividly clear the process whereby we compile our visual experience of numerous similar things to arrive at an abstract concept. Galton then elaborated on Huxley’s point in further articles on the formation of sense impressions into ‘generic images’.68 The idea was widely influential; it was utilized by Darwin’s protégé George John Romanes in his pioneering works of comparative psychology, Mental Evolution in Animals (1883) and Mental Evolution in Man (1888).69 Here, the relevance of the theory to ‘primitivist’ aesthetics becomes clearer. Romanes, who was the first to use the term ‘logic of images’, emphasized the continuity of development between animal cognition, based on crude visual metaphor, and human conceptualization, showing that both worked through the association of sense data. His conclusions were cited approvingly in influential works by Lloyd Morgan and William James.70 It is this set of ideas that provides the substance of L’Évolution des idées générales, which borrows the terms ‘generic image’, ‘percept’, ‘recept’ and ‘logic of images’ largely from British sources. From Romanes and Lloyd Morgan, Ribot takes numerous examples of animal behaviour.71 He also discusses a mental imagery test used to measure degrees of visualized thought among a pool of respondents. This was closely modelled on Galton’s statistical study of 1880, which sought to establish the prevalence of abstract thought at the higher levels of intellectual development.72 The manner in which this test was presented reveals the ideological implications of these theories of conceptualization. Galton’s visual imagery questionnaire was circulated primarily among his personal circle of ‘eminent men’, whom he was inclined to identify as an intellectual elite. He reported that ‘the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied, protested that mental imagery was unknown to them’.73 It was, however, common among those in ‘general society’, and it was most vivid among ‘bushmen’ and schoolboys. The pursuit of an imagistic, intuitive mind thus involved a return to the state of animals and children, a conclusion echoed in a more positive vein by Ribot and Bergson. Much of Hulme’s image-based poetry may well be described as primitivist in spirit, and his deliberate pursuit of this pre-conceptual simplicity in fact constitutes a political gesture. Although Galton acknowledged that the loss of imagery was a ‘deficiency’ of the elite, he also held it as a sign of higher mental function; Hulme was rejecting this value judgement. A pioneer of

The Discord Club

39

eugenics, Galton had a particular interest in identifying benchmarks of abstract intelligence, and it should be recalled that this world view interlocked with the institutions of Hulme’s education. For example, Galton’s work from Hereditary Genius (1869) onwards often fixated on Cambridge’s Mathematics Tripos as the gold standard of abstract intelligence.74 Hulme’s wilful defiance of academic discipline might be read as a rejection, not only of Edwardian social codes, but also of the imbricated values of a liberal positivist episteme. Spurning a traditional gateway into the professional elite, he also failed Galton’s criterion of evolutionary ascendency. It was fitting that he was sent down by Donald MacAlister, Senior Tutor of St John’s, celebrated Senior Wrangler of 1877 and a key contributor to Galton’s survey of visual imagery, whose career made manifest the institutionalization of a statistical, abstract methodology with regard to the life sciences.75 Hulme’s rebellion began with a deliberate defiance of abstract social codes, leading to criminal proceedings that forcibly categorized, on a statistical logic, this lifelong teetotaller as ‘drunk and disorderly’. 76 His expulsion from the professional elite was then formalized by an exemplary specimen of Galton’s abstract thinker. By 1908, Hulme’s poetic theory, with its pursuit of a ‘logic of images’, again defied Galton’s emphasis on abstraction, turning instead to the lower stages of cognition, in which visual data has yet to be blurred into a conceptual counter.

Ribot, Bergson and the image The attraction of Galton’s method, if not his conclusions, was that it offered a point of departure for those who sought to legitimize avant-garde creativity in scientific terms. Hulme found Ribot and Bergson’s positivist method empowering – their analysis gave the Symbolist aesthetic a definite, empirical structure, and thus a new potency.77 Moreover, their work, although bearing the imprimatur of the French academy, was touched with a sympathy for creative or spiritually inclined activity. Already in the L’Évolution des idées générales, Ribot had taken Galton’s description of abstraction as a ‘deficiency’ a step further in criticizing abstraction as ‘bankruptcy’; two years later, engaging directly with aesthetics, his Essai sur l’imagination créatrice (1900) contrasted mere ‘intellectual analogy’ with the richness in poetry of emotionally charged images.78 Within the creative realm, he distinguishes between the ‘diffluent’ and the ‘plastic’ imagination. These correspond to different orientations of mind – the former finding its subject in internal states, emotions and other unconscious

40

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

factors, the latter dealing with external, visual and tactile data. Ribot gives examples of both taken from contemporary literary practice: the ‘diffluent’ style is evidently closely related to the Symbolist aesthetic, while the ‘plastic’, identified specifically with Théophile Gautier, had ‘found its most complete expression among the Parnassians’. Ribot’s analysis confirms Beaunier’s account of the two movements as paraphrased in Hulme’s ‘Lecture’. Hulme does not reject the internal focus of the ‘diffluent’ thinker but seeks to maintain the pertinence of the Parnassian or ‘plastic’ viewpoint to both external and internal states, using the Symbolist technique of vers libre. He thus materializes the Symbolist aesthetic and internalizes the Parnassian one, to grasp and fix moments from the stream of consciousness.79 It remains to be said that the connection of images recommended in these passages comes very close to those suggested by Bergson. In his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889; trans. as Time and Free Will (1910)), he described a kind of art that would apply the precision of sculpture to the internal life, while Le Rire (1900; trans. as Laughter (1911)) contains his fullest exposition on the role of art in breaking through the veil of generalities ‘to bring us face to face with reality itself ’.80 Elsewhere, he describes intuition in terms strongly reminiscent of the Galtonian ‘logic of images’ adapted by Ribot. In a lecture entitled ‘Intuition Philosophique’ (1911), he describes intuition as ‘a certain intermediary image between the simplicity of the concrete intuition and the complexity of the abstractions which translate it’.81 This distinction between raw sense data, concept and image was expanded in his lengthy account of the differences between instinct, intelligence and intuition in L’Évolution créatrice (1907; trans. as Creative Evolution, (1911)).82 Instinct, the remnant of our animal minds, correlates to Romanes and Ribot’s ‘logic of images’. Although beneath us, evolutionarily speaking, animal instinct has advantages that may be recoverable. If we can maintain our self-consciousness, predicated as it is on the spatial thinking associated with conceptual life, while re-entering the intuitive, then we can regain the richness of animal consciousness while remaining self-aware. How is this to be achieved, this return to the logic of images? The conceptual life was achieved by an ever-accelerating compilation of similar images into categories, replaced eventually by words. To break up these categories, we must reverse the process. We must learn to think backwards, to think against the grain. In one of his most famous passages, frequently quoted in studies of Hulme’s Imagism, Bergson suggests that intuition is achieved not through the movement

The Discord Club

41

towards conceptualization through converging images of similar things, but by a clash of numerous different images: No image will replace the intuition of duration, but many different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to direct the consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, since it would then be driven out immediately by its rivals.83

This contrasts with Galton’s recommendation regarding intellectual analogy in the pursuit of conceptualization: ‘[n]o statistician dreams of combining objects into the same generic group that do not cluster towards a common centre; no more should we attempt to compose generic portraits out of heterogeneous elements, for if we do so the result is monstrous and meaningless’.84 Set against this reduction of similar things towards simplistic, supposedly ‘real’ generic concepts, the creative imagination thrived precisely on a collision of dissimilarities. This is just what Ribot saw occurring in the creative imagination, what Bergson described as intuition and what the Imagists attempted to do in poetry – the presentation of incongruous, clashing images to recreate the emotional prompt of their original collocation. When Hulme adapts his theory of the image from Ribot, he is also borrowing from, and rebelling against, Galton’s eugenic psychology. Similarly, when Hulme borrows from Bergson, he also shares in a partial appreciation, but also the subversion, of positivist thinking. The structures of an abstracting, liberal positivism remain, but the value judgement has altered; the direction of thought has been reversed. A characteristic tension across much of Hulme’s work – a simultaneous desire for order, and a recognition that such order can only ever be an illusion – is re-enacted here in microcosm. His adaptations of evolutionary psychology thus reveal a recurring, condensed pattern of enchantment and disillusion with rigidly scientific analysis.

Politics of the image Ribot uses the metaphor of money: concepts, like coins, must be rooted in substances of genuine value. The metaphor implies hostility to the abstractions of capitalist exchange. It echoes radical rhetoric that accused liberal economies of stripping individuals of their flesh and blood status. Ribot, while retaining

42

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

academic credentials, is able to introduce a note of polemic against this intellectual abstraction and, metaphorically, against its economic equivalent. Recalling his earlier motto, ‘ “Abstract thought is a cadaver” ’, he similarly implies that ‘diffluent’ poetry runs the risk of ‘bankrupting’ itself through abstraction, and that conceptual exchange cheapens its coinage as it is removed from tangible reality.85 A political implication becomes clearer. The homme moyen, like Galton’s composite portrait, risks making the individual a skeletal abstract form. Ribot’s recommendation regarding language is that we keep looking back to the flesh and blood, the tangible reality. This desire to maintain individuality while promoting a shared idea or principle overlapped with notions of utopian social formation also being discussed in Paris. For example, Remy de Gourmont, a leading figure in the literary avant-garde, absorbed both academic and radical writing and, in this way, took Ribot’s hints of discontent with intellectual abstraction in a much more radical direction. Hulme read and kept notes on Gourmont’s work, which has long been identified as one of the main sources of the Imagist aesthetic.86 Gourmont’s criticism implicitly aligned itself with anarchist and radical individualist rhetoric in Paris, which in turn referred frequently to a constellation of radical thinkers, including Stirner, Nietzsche and Bakunin. Ribot, working within the academy, had no time for radicals like Nietzsche, whom he dismissed as a ‘penseur’ not a ‘systématique’, yet Gourmont strikingly brings his work together with Nietzsche’s ‘physiologism’ and ‘perspectivism’.87 A key influence is Nietzsche’s 1873 essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’, which anticipates much of Hulme’s rhetoric, describing the same construction of meaning from metaphor; it is possible that Hulme absorbed this text both directly and through Gourmont’s paraphrase.88 Beginning with the allegorical tale of a gnat that somehow gains self-awareness for a second and attempts to make sense of the universe for the brief span of its life before dying, Nietzsche argues that human consciousness deludes itself in identifying truth and falsity. Subject to an impulse towards system building, our anthropomorphic interpretation of the world is founded on analogy. Nietzsche sees human systems as an endless sequence of metaphors constructed into elaborate, artificial structures of knowledge. He proposes a radical upheaval of this conceptual edifice and concludes his essay by describing how the ‘intuitive man’ might refresh the architecture of his consciousness by permitting the eruption of metaphor through apparently permanent conceptual structures.89

The Discord Club

43

In Le Problème de style (1902), Gourmont draws the same link between forms of ‘realism’ and the illusory nature of abstract language; in his discussion of the formation of concepts, he writes that ‘[a]n idea is only a faded sensation, an effaced image’. Reasoning, as with Ribot’s formula, involves abstraction, it is ‘to assemble and combine, into a laboured mosaic, faded cubes that have become almost indistinguishable’.90 Nietzsche writes that ‘even the concept – which is bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die – is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor.’91 Gourmont similarly describes ‘those marvellous structures which seem purely intellectual works but which, in reality, are the material work of the senses and their organs like the combs of bees with their wax and honey.’ Nietzsche used the same analogy: ‘just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, a graveyard of perceptions’.92 It is in their chosen metaphors, in their attempt to convey the deadening effect of language itself, through a startling, revivifying image, that one sees the affinities of these writers, both intellectual and stylistic.93 If Ribot seems to criticize the bankruptcy of abstraction, Gourmont is aggressively anti-rational; he seeks a highly individualized expression of immediate sensory experience, expressed according to temperament: ‘Style is the specialisation of the sensibility.’94 Symbolists like Gourmont identified themselves as ‘individualistes’, a term which, in France, was loaded with postrevolutionary political connotations. The egoism already present in Symbolism was increasingly politicized by literary radicals, who were subject to state suppression in the 1890s.95 Perhaps the most extreme and influential version of social nominalism came in Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own (1845), written in response, and opposition, to Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1841). The most radical of the Young Hegelian group active in 1840s Germany, Stirner was condemned by his contemporary Karl Marx for his adaptation of Hegel’s dialectic to justify an extreme individualism, rejecting all social structures and obligations that cramp the individual will.96 His work, fallen into obscurity, was rediscovered by the Scottish-German intellectual John Henry Mackay in 1898, and a 1907 English translation extended his influence among radical circles in Britain and America.97 Inspired by Feuerbach’s reworking of religion as a projection of unrealized human self-idealization, Stirner rejects the ideal of ‘Man’ similarly. He presents a very similar philosophy in terms of its rejection of abstraction in favour of solidly felt, localized, particular experience. Stirner’s nominalistic defiance of soul-draining abstract principles inspired modernist efforts to displace mere representation with forms of verbal embodiment.

44

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

The guild idea in London An appreciative review of The Ego and His Own appeared in the New Age in 1907, summing up the social nominalist case: Man who is not a particular man, but a being from whom all particularities have vanished through sublimation. In place of the concepts of myriads of individuals as they are, and myriads of individuals as they actually might be, we abstract from both, and make Man as he is, and Man as we think he ought to be […]. But this sacrifice of real individuals to the non-existent and impossible Perfect Man is exactly similar to sacrifices made to any other abstract Mumbo-Jumbo.98

The process of concept formation described by Ribot, Gourmont and Nietzsche is mirrored here. As Stirner demonstrated in response to Feuerbach, the apparently liberating celebration of Humanity is really just another kind of idealism, albeit internalized. Indeed, the emphasis on sensuous language that Gourmont and Hulme sought is directly related to this desire to re-embody the individual, and as such, it connects a continental anarchism to the avant-garde New Age network in England. These connections are partial, however, and complicated by other conflicting priorities: the New Age was always an explicitly socialist paper and could hardly commit to Stirner’s complete rejection of society. Hulme’s later Toryism raises other questions and aligns him with the French conservative revival. One must bear in mind that the New Age’s account of Stirner appeared within a journal full of contradictory voices. Its author was anonymous, but it might have been Holbrook Jackson, Orage’s co-editor from 1907–1908, and a connoisseur of radical literature, whose interest in Stirner was as much that of a bibliophile as a political sympathizer.99 Orage, sole editor by 1908, was an even more unlikely Stirnerian: despite a taste for similar Nietzschean rhetoric, his long-standing spiritualism and commitment to social reform stood at odds with Stirnerian individualism. Indeed, in an article of 1911, he attacked Stirner (and implicitly, Dora Marsden’s Egoist) for glorifying what was merely a stage in the ‘evolution of the self ’ towards a higher social and spiritual unity. It seems unlikely that Hulme, at any stage in his career, would have committed himself to a doctrine of radical scepticism which denied the possibility of any revival or reconstruction of objective values. What is true, however, is that such a resistance to the abstracting effect of utilitarian liberal logic was a feature of London radical thought, in literature as well as politics. The problem faced by the New Age, and indeed by Hulme,

The Discord Club

45

was how a commitment to personal expression could be maintained within a communitarian politics. Looking back to the medieval Guild system, the New Age socialists associated the integrity of the work of art with the integrity of the society in which it was created. A society balanced between the needs of the individual and the needs of the social whole creates an ideal work of art; the work of art shares this equilibrium in its reconciliation of particulars in an aesthetic whole. Within small avant-garde groups, also, this integrity of the collective depended on the reconciliation of individuals – but to achieve this would always remain a struggle, a delicate balance, between a general idea and participants with unique expressive needs. Hulme’s poetics respond to similar philosophical problems regarding expressive freedom within a movement as the avant-garde political pluralism being debated around him – a political milieu that hovered between forms of anarchism and socialism, and gestured, like Ruskin and Morris, to an indigenous, medieval ‘Guild’ idea. Paul Edwards points to Hulme’s attitude to ‘clubs’ as illustrative of his frame of mind: on one hand, he revelled in the neatness of their rules and order, in harnessing many individuals into one hard body, an essential category, a species.100 But, on the other, he railed against the laziness, the complacent assumption, of a common identity. As Edwards notes, Hulme’s ‘Rules 1908’, a list of twelve rules which formed the constitution of the Poets’ Club, is a masterpiece in its attention to detail – and yet it was he who proved ‘an extremely trying’ honorary secretary, who attacked the president in public and left within months.101 Having left the Poets’ Club, Hulme formed what Ezra Pound called ‘the School of Images’, meeting at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel in Percy Street, to discuss the advantages of an image-based poetry. Notably, this small group included a significant political element: Joseph Campbell, Desmond Fitzgerald and Padraic Colum were Irish nationalists; Florence Farr was a suffragette, spiritualist and New Woman; F. S. Flint, a committed socialist. Representatives of all the groups responsible for ‘the strange death of Liberal England’, according to George Dangerfield, were in attendance.102 Yet a cross-ideological dynamic was also at work: F. W. Tancred was the grandson of a baronet and a member of the London Stock Exchange, and Edward Storer a successful businessman. Hulme had yet to declare himself a stalwart Tory; though in his manner he may have flirted with that identity, he at one point claimed to be a socialist, and by the end of 1909, he was using the radically inclined Irish Literary Society’s London base as his return address.103 The complex interplay of his radical and conservative impulses is borne out by his choice of social milieu: despite having composed the elaborate rules of the

46

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Poets’ Club down to its dress code, he had abandoned it to form what might be described as a new ‘discord club’, specializing in cognitive and ideological disruption.104 Indeed, a composite portrait of the new group’s members would result in a series of odd juxtapositions, although the common intellectual feature that would emerge, as Flint put it, was a commitment to a notion of the Image.105 Beyond that, and particularly among its more radical members, the club projected a perceptible dissatisfaction with the cultural and political status quo. Their commitment to the image was not merely a ‘verse revolution’ but had political motivations. Helen Carr has persuasively argued that the Imagists were moved originally by a spirit of liberation, not by what Donald Davie has called ‘a direct line towards fascism’.106 Conversely, it must be recalled that Hulme’s ‘Lecture’ marks the beginning of just one of several ‘Imagisms’, some of which gravitated in different political directions to others.107 It is this pluralism to which this chapter ultimately points, in the manner of Peter Nicholls’ account of ‘modernisms’, or more recently Roger Griffin’s theory of overlapping, subsidiary forms of cultural and political modernisms.108 The ideas recounted here are not to be judged retrospectively in terms of whether they mark the beginnings of a ‘pure’ Imagism (or indeed a pure ‘conservatism’, ‘fascism’ or ‘modernism’), but are to be seen as representative of one Imagism – one Imagist – among many.

Notes 1

Hulme’s name is invoked suggestively, but not centrally, in various accounts of anarchist modernism. See Levenson, Genealogy; Hallberg, ‘Libertarian Imagism’; Clarke, Dora Marsden; Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism and Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), to name a few. 2 Levenson, Genealogy; Clarke, Dora Marsden. 3 See Andrew Warwick’s account of the examination in Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). ‘The examinations themselves were intended partly as tests of endurance, taking place on consecutive mornings and afternoons for four and five days together’ (p. 186). 4 Hulme’s headmaster predicted that he would graduate among the top ‘wranglers’ based on his performance at Newcastle High School. The record of his fall from grace at Cambridge can be found in his tutorial file in the archives of St John’s College (tutorial files 13.7 and 11.9).

The Discord Club 5

6

7

8 9 10

11

12 13

47

Accounts and dating differ in some details, see Herbert Read, ‘Introduction’, in T. E. Hulme, Speculations (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924), p. ix; Michael Roberts, T. E. Hulme (London: Faber, 1938), pp. 15–16; Samuel Hynes, ‘Introduction’, in Further Speculations of T. E. Hulme (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), pp. vii–xxxi; A. R. Jones, Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (London: Gollancz, 1960), pp. 22–24; Csengeri, ‘Introduction’, CW, xi–xii; Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, pp. 34–35. Hulme explains, in ‘Notes on Bergson’ (1911), how before reading Bergson he was aware of ‘two elements in my mind […] a dark problem’ and ‘a vaguely seen way of escape […] the nightmare […] and “the chess-board” […] the roughly-modelled key I had imagined might release me from this nightmare’. CW, p. 127. The metaphor is spelt out in Hulme’s first published article (‘The New Philosophy’, New Age, 5.10 (1 July 1909), 198–99; CW pp. 85–55) in which he describes ‘on one hand the complicated, intertwined, inextricable flux of reality, on the other the constructions of the intellect, having all the clearness and “thinness” of a geometrical diagram. To use another metaphor, on the one hand a chaotic cinderheap, on the other a chess-board’. CW, p. 86. Hulme, ‘Cinders’ (c. 1906), CW, pp. 7–22. T. E. Hulme, ‘Notes on Bergson II’, New Age, 9.26 (26 October 1911), 610–11 (611); CW, p. 131. Karen Csengeri describes Hulme’s position as ‘a sort of nominalism’ in ‘The Intellectual Development of T. E. Hulme’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 32.1 (1989), 7–25 (p. 7). Csengeri’s introduction to Hulme’s Collected Writings rightly notes that ‘most of the ideas here are not new to philosophy’ but ‘have here their own particular grain’ (CW, xii). Rae too describes Hulme’s position in ‘Cinders’ as ‘nominalist rather than realist, Heraclitean rather than Platonist’ and recounts how ‘Hulme discusses a number of contemporary philosophers in terms of the realist/ nominalist opposition, and indicates his affinity with the latter position’ (‘T.E. Hulme’s French Sources: A Reconsideration’, Comparative Literature 41 (1989), 68–99 (p. 89 n. 50). Bertrand Russell provides a useful introduction in Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Home University, 1912), pp. 142–78. For a survey, see Gyula Klima, ‘The Medieval Problem of Universals’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Autumn 2013), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/ universals-medieval. Hulme, ‘Cinders’, p. 8. Ibid. Darwin’s protegé George John Romanes provides a typical discussion of Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley and Hume in his heavily Darwinian work Mental Evolution in Man (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1888), pp. 20–39.

48

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

14 Marx, also developing ideas from Hegel and Feuerbach, had made a similar case for social nominalism but condemned Stirner’s extreme version in The German Ideology (1845–1846; first published 1932). 15 See Levenson, Genealogy; Hallberg, ‘Libertarian Imagism’; Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism; Clarke, Dora Marsden. 16 Paul Edwards, ‘The Imagery of T.E. Hulme’s Notebooks’, in T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, ed. by Edward Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 23–38. 17 See Kermode, Romantic Image; Graham Hough, Image and Experience (London: Duckworth, 1960). 18 Patricia Rae, ‘From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game: Representations of Truth in Vorticist Art’, ELH: A Journal of English Literary History, 56.3 (Fall 1989), 689–720. 19 ‘Notes on Language and Style’, CW, pp. 29. Dating from 1907, this notebook was first published by Herbert Read in The Criterion, 3.13 (July 1925), 485–49. References here cite the more complete text in CW, pp. 23–45. 20 Ibid., p. 24. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 25. 23 Ibid., p. 29. 24 Ibid., p. 25. 25 See Karen Csengeri, ‘T. E. Hulme’s Borrowings from the French’, Comparative Literature, 34 (Winter 1982), 16–27 for details of these literary sources. 26 See Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Alexander Varias, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives During the Fin de Siècle (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996). 27 See Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); in relation to the visual arts, Gaetano DeLeonibus, ‘The Quarrel over Classicism: A Quest for Uniqueness’, in Nationalism and French Visual Culture 1870–1914, ed. by June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 293–306). 28 Kate Lechmere recalled in 1938 that it was delivered in 1914, but she may have confused it with Hulme’s lecture on modern art of January that year. Keele University Library Archives. Hulme Papers, HUL 61, Kate Lechmere to Michael Roberts, 10–11 February 1938. Roberts dates the lecture to ‘April and May 1914’ on the strength of this communication in T. E. Hulme, p. 21. Harmer dates it 1908–1909 (Victory in Limbo, p. 30). Internal evidence suggests it was delivered to the Poets’ Club, of which Hulme was the secretary from 1908 to 1909. Ronald Schuchard has dated it to November 1908, and his evidence is convincing. Ronald Schuchard, ‘ “As Regarding Rhythm”: Yeats and the Imagists’, in Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 2 (1984), 209–26, cited by Csengeri in CW, p. 49. Despite this,

The Discord Club

29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40 41 42

49

Vincent Sherry states that the lecture was ‘first written in 1908 [and] revised for delivery in 1914’, in Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 38–39. Helen Carr treats it as a product of 1908 in The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D., and the Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), pp. 159–64. T. E. Hulme, ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908), CW, pp. 49–56. For example, in ‘Cinders’, Hulme targets ‘Hegelians’ (CW, p. 8); ‘the moralists, the capital lettrists’, (CW, p. 10); he resolves to ‘never speak of my unconquerable soul or any other vulgarism of that sort’, (CW, p. 18); but to ‘call my philosophy the “Valet to the Absolute”. The Absolute not a hero to his own valet’ (CW, p. 19). He considers how ‘the metaphysican imagines that he surveys the world as with an eagle eye […] but the eye is in the mud, the eye is mud’ (CW, p. 19). In ‘Notes on Language and Style’, he describes the desire for a higher power, a ‘force majeure’, yet ‘all the foundations of the scaffolding are in us, but we want an illusion, falsifying us, something independent of foundations’ (CW, pp. 27–28). Numerous other notes seem to cast doubt on philosophical Idealism and corresponding forms of romanticism in these texts. Hulme, ‘Lecture’, pp. 49–56. Ibid., pp. 51–52. Ibid., p. 50. The source is Gustave Kahn, ‘Introduction’, Premiers poèmes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1897), p. 23. André Beaunier, ‘Introduction’, La Poésie nouvelle (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1902), pp. 9–44. The attack on atomistic psychology echoes Bergson’s criticism of John Stuart Mill’s account of thought processes as divisible into disparate mental steps in Time and Free Will. Hulme follows Visan in identifying Taine as a specific example of this thinking in France which chimed with Parnassian poetry. See T. E. Hulme, ‘L’Attitude du lyrisme contemporain’, New Age, 9.17 (24 August 1911), 400–01; CW, pp. 57–58. Hulme, ‘Lecture’, pp. 45, 49. Ibid., p. 52. See A. G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885–1895 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950) for a detailed account, pp. 38, 42, 57. See Patricia Rae’s detailed reconstruction and comparison of French Symbolist and Hulmean aesthetics in ‘Some Theories’, pp. 60–132; pp. 280–384; Rae, Practical Muse, pp. 33–37. Hulme, ‘Lecture’, p. 52. Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899), pp. 69–96; Beaunier, ‘Introduction’, pp. 20–24. Hulme, ‘Lecture’, p. 53. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 51.

50

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

43 Helen Carr, ‘T. E. Hulme and the Spiritual Dread of Space’, T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, pp. 93–112 (pp. 100, 108–11); Carr, Verse Revolutionaries, pp. 163–64. 44 As noted by Ronald Bush in an unpublished seminar paper, ‘Modernism and Gender Politics’ delivered to the London Modernism Seminar (6 November 2004). 45 Levenson, Genealogy, p. 79. For Vincent Sherry, this is not a problem: he dates the lecture from 1914, seeing signs of Worringer’s influence. Sherry, Ezra Pound, pp. 38–39. 46 Hulme, ‘Lecture’, p. 52. Jean-Marie Guyau, Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1884), p. 176; L’Art au point de vue sociologique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889), p. 86. Karen Csengeri discusses the debt to Guyau in ‘Hulme’s Borrowings from the French’, pp. 24–25. 47 Hulme, ‘Lecture’, p. 53. 48 Ibid., p. 56. 49 See Chapter 4 for a detailed account of this tendency. 50 Hulme, ‘Lecture’, p. 56. 51 Gautier, ‘L’Art’, p. 216. 52 Hulme, ‘Lecture’, pp. 53, 52. 53 Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 10, 16–39; Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), p. 113. For further discussion, see Chapter 4. 54 Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 135, 143, 144, 159, 177, 182. 55 Villis, Reaction and the Avant-Garde. 56 Hulme, ‘Lecture’, p. 54. 57 Ibid., p. 55. 58 Rae, ‘Hulme’s French Sources’; Rae, Practical Muse. 59 Wallace Martin, ‘Sources for the Imagist Aesthetic’, PMLA, 85.2 (March 1970), 196–204; Csengeri, ‘T. E. Hulme’s Borrowings from the French’; Rae, ‘Hulme’s French Sources’. 60 Martin, ‘Sources’, pp. 199–200. Ribot introduces the term ‘images generiques’ in L’Évolution des idées générales (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1897) [henceforth EIG], p. 14; Evolution of General Ideas trans. F. A. Welby. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company; 1899 [henceforth EGI], p. 10. Ribot introduces the term ‘logique des images’, in EIG, pp. 32–37; EGI, pp. 26–39. 61 EGI 133. ‘Nous avons vu l’abstraction, à mesure qu’elle monte et s’affermit, se séparer de plus en plus nettement de l’image et finalement, au moment du symbolisme pur, la séparation devient un antagonisme. C’est que, au fond, il y a entre les deux, dès le début, opposition de nature et de procédé. L’idéal de l’image est une complexité toujours croissante, l’idéal de l’abstraction est une

The Discord Club

62 63 64

65

66

67

68

69

51

simplification toujours croissante: parce que l’une se forme par addition et l’autre par soustraction.’ EIG, 151. EIG, p. 32; EGI, p. 26. EIG, pp. 14–15; EGI, p. 10. The principle is adapted from the classic associationist theories of Locke, Hume and Taine. As this tradition had it, the mind analyses and categorizes sense impressions, and its own thought processes, through a process of dissociation and association. The clustered, intertwined attributes that constitute things in the world, or internal states of mind, are taken apart; some elements are emphasized, others fade into the background, depending on the needs and drives of the perceiving consciousness. The result is a basic schematic form, which can be identified, by analogy, with similar schemas recalled from past experience. The thing encountered is thus stripped of its unique aspects and presented as an abstract concept – a word. (EIG 5–16; EGI, pp. 1–11). Francis Galton, ‘Composite portraits made by combining those of many different persons into a single figure’, Nature, 18 (1878), 97–100. Galton wrote many articles on this subject, a condensed summary of which is included in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: MacMillan, 1883), pp. 8–19, 339–63. This corresponds to ‘species realism’: the prevailing belief after Darwin and before Mendel that the richness of biological phenomena could be classified according to certain eternal categories. See Ginzburg, ‘Family Resemblances and Family Trees’ for a penetrating essay on the significance of Galton’s composite photograph as the revival of a form of Idealism, and the undercutting of the idea by Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances. Both are relevant to the present study of ‘modernism’ as an ‘ideal-type’, as discussed in the introduction. T. H. Huxley, Hume, ed. by John Morley (London: Macmillan, 1878), pp. 92–94. Repr. in Collected Essays, 9 vols (London: Macmillan and Co, 1894–1908), VI: Hume: With Helps to the Study of Berkeley, ed. by Appleton (1894), p. 111. Francis Galton, ‘Les Images generiques’, La Revue Scientifique, 17 (1879), 221–25; Francis Galton, ‘Generic Images’, Nineteenth-Century, 6 (July 1879), 157–69; ‘Combined Portraits, and the Combination of Sense Impressions Generally’, Proceedings of the Birmingham Philosophical Society 2 (1879), 26–29. Some of this material appears in Inquiries into Human Faculty, pp. 83–114, 339–63. For a fuller account, see David Burbridge, ‘Galton’s 100: an Exploration of Francis Galton’s Imagery Studies’, British Journal of the History of Science, 27 (1994), 443–63. The connection is anticipated in Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883), pp. 42, 61. It is made explicit in his later book, Mental Evolution in Man in which Romanes discusses Galton and Huxley’s metaphor on p. 23. He introduces the term ‘recepts’ on pp. 36–39, and the term ‘logic of images’ on p. 41. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 40–69 (p. 40). In the latter work, Romanes gives ‘generic images’ the new name ‘recepts’, as opposed to

52

70

71

72 73 74

75

76 77 78

79 80

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism ‘percepts’ (sense impressions in their unfiltered form) and describes their use as a ‘logic of images’. Romanes’s work is crucial in its focus on the ‘great borderland, or terra media, lying between particular ideas and general ideas’. He emphasizes the continuity of evolution between animal concepts and human concepts, observably close even in the crucial region between preverbal and verbalized intelligence. Despite this proximity between the animal and the human, Romanes still believed that somewhere on this continuum was a radical break. The ‘terra media’, wherein lay the mysterious border-crossing between animal instinct and human ratiocination, was clearly a point of departure for Ribot’s work on preverbal levels of consciousness and points the way towards Bergson’s similar enquiry. Galton, Huxley and Romanes’s accounts of the generic idea were discussed with admiration by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890), and Romanes’s vocabulary was adopted by Lloyd Morgan in his influential study of animal psychology in 1891. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), I, 254–55, 265–66; II, 46–48. C. Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence (London: Edward Arnold, 1891), p. 325. The latter also cites the composite photograph metaphor introduced by Galton and Hume, p. 326. Romanes, in Mental Evolution in Man (pp. 51–63, 74–75), gives examples of concept formation in animals, include several later cited by Ribot, EIG, pp. 17–37, 102–03; EGI, pp. 11–30, 89. Francis Galton, ‘Statistics of Mental Imagery’, Mind, 5 (1880), 301–18. Cf EIG, pp. 129–45; EGI, pp. 113–28. Galton, ‘Statistics’, p. 302. Revealingly, Galton had failed the examination himself and remained insecure regarding his status within the intellectual family line of Darwin. Michael Bulmer, Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Donald MacAlister collaborated with Galton to refine the latter’s statistical method in ‘The Law of the Geometric Mean’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, 29 (1879), 367–76. A. J. Crilly, ‘MacAlister, Sir Donald, first baronet (1854–1934)’ (first published 2004) Dictionary of National Biography, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/34659. See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 28. As Rae has shown in The Practical Muse. Théodule Ribot, Essai sur l’imagination créatrice (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1900); Essay on the Creative Imagination, trans. A. H. N. Baron (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1906). William James had first used this term in his Principles of Psychology (1890). ‘[A]rt […] has no other object than to brush aside […] generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality

The Discord Club

81

82

83

84 85 86

87

88

89

53

itself ’, Laughter, trans. by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: MacMillan, 1911), p. 157. ‘L’Intuition Philosophique: Conférence faite au Congrès de Philosophie de Bologne le 10 avril 1911’, repr. in La Pensée et le mouvant. Essais et conferences. París: Félix Alcan, 1934, pp. 135–62; ‘Philosophical Intuition: Lecture given at the Philosophical Congress at Bologna, April 10 1911’, in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 126–52. Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1907), pp. iv–v, 192, 210. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), pp. xii, 177, 193. Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (March 1902), 225–43. Translated by Hulme in his Introduction to Metaphysics (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 16. ‘Nulle image ne remplacera l’intuition de la durée, mais beaucoup d’images diverses, empruntées à des ordres de choses très différents, pourront, par la convergence de leur action, diriger la conscience sur le point précis où il y a une certaine intuition à saisir. En choisissant les images aussi disparates que possible, on empêchera l’une quelconque d’entre elles d’usurper la place de l’intuition qu’elle est chargée d’appeler, puisqu’elle serait alors chassée tout de suite par ses rivales’ ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’, p. 7. Galton, ‘Generic Images’, 157–69. EGI, p. 135; EIG, p. 153; Ribot, Essay on the Creative Imagination, pp. 203–04. Gourmont’s influence on Hulme was first suggested by Read in his ‘Introductory Note’ to ‘Notes on Language and Style’, The Criterion, 3.13 (July 1925), 485–97, and Taupin, in L’Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine (de 1910 à 1920) (Paris: H. Champion, 1929), but was dismissed by Martin in ‘Sources’, and Csengeri in ‘Hulme’s Borrowings’. There is, however, evidence in the Hull archive (DHU 2) that Hulme read and made notes on Gourmont’s Le livres de masques (1896), and it is this chapter’s contention that he responded to Nietzschean aspects of the image theory in Le Problème de style (1902), the radical overtones of which distinguished it from other sources, including Ribot and Bergson. Ribot’s remarks are quoted in Jacques Morland, ‘Une Enquête sur l’influence allemande’, Mercure de France, 44.155 (Nov 1902), 289–382; 44.156 (Dec 1902), 647–95. The essay was available in the 1897 German edition of Nietzsches Werke, which was available in Britain by the time Hulme was studying German in 1906. Conversely, he may have absorbed Nietzsche’s ideas via the French avant-garde, particularly Gourmont’s Le Problème de style. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’ (1873) in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979, pp. 79–91 (p. 90).

54

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

90 Remy de Gourmont: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Glenn Burne. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. p. 122. ‘une idée n’est qu’une sensation défraichie, une image effacée; raisoneer avec des idées, c’est assembler et combiner, et une laborieuse mosaique, des cubes décolorés, devenus presque indiscernables’ Le Problème du style, p. 69. 91 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies’, p. 85. 92 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies’, p. 85; Selected Writings, p. 122. ‘Ces merveilleuses constructions qui semblent de pures ouevres intellectuelles et qui, en réalité, sont l’oeuvre matérielle des sens et de leurs organes comme les cellules des abeilles avec leur cire et leur miel’ (Le Problème de style, p. 70). 93 The textual echoes are so close, and Gourmont’s tributes to Nietzsche so open, that a direct debt to Nietzsche’s essay seems likely. Editions of Nietzsche’s work including this essay were available in Paris from 1896: for example, the Bibliothèque nationale holds copies of the text in the Gesammtausgabe Koegel and Großoktavausgabe volumes of 1896 and 1903, respectively. Le Problème du style was published in 1902. 94 Selected Writings, p. 117. ‘Le style est une spécialisation de la sensibilité’ (Le Problème du style, p. 41). 95 Forth, Zarathustra in Paris, pp. 19, 100–09. See also Venita Datta, The Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 27, 49, 53, 55–60. 96 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846; Moscow: Marx-Engels Institute, 1932; first English translation, 1939; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), pp. 1, 2, 23–32, 40, 41, 67, 83, 87, 100–01, 104, 108, 115, 117. Part II consists of a line-by-line attack on Stirner’s work. See Lawrence Stepelevich, ‘Max Stirner as Hegelian’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 15 (1985), 597–614; David McLennan, The Young Hegelians (London: MacMillan, 1980), pp. 117–36; and John Carroll, Break Out from the Crystal Palace (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). 97 The Ego and His Own, trans. by Steven T. Byington (New York: Benjamin Tucker, 1907). For a modern, scholarly edition, see The Ego and Its Own, ed. by David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See Lawrence Stepelevich, ‘The Revival of Max Stirner’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (April–June 1974), 323–28. Stirner’s ideas had an impact in Britain prior to the 1907 translation of his work, for example in the anarchist journal The Eagle and the Serpent. 98 Anonymous, ‘The Unique Individual: The Ego and His Own’ [Review], NA, 1.16 (15 August 1907), 251. 99 Jackson recalls the Stirnerian journal The Eagle and the Serpent in his study The Eighteen-Nineties (London: Grant Richards, 1913), pp. 129–30.

The Discord Club

55

100 Pound remarked that Hulme was ‘the Pickwickian Englishman who forms a club’ (quoted in Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 58) and indeed his career involved many clubs, from his school debating society to the Discord Club, the Poet’s Club and the ‘Secession Club’ or ‘School of Images’. See Chapter four for an account of his role in forging artistic groupings. See Edwards, ‘Imagery’, pp. 23–38 (pp. 23, 26, 34). 101 Edwards, ‘Hulme’s Notebooks’, p. 26; Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, pp. 43–44; Henry Simpson, President of the Poet’s Club, is quoted by Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 43. Ferguson also reprints Hulme’s ‘Rules 1908’, p. 44. 102 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London: Constable, 1935), ‘The Tory Rebellion’, pp. 70–132; ‘The Women’s Rebellion’, pp. 133–205; ‘The Workers’ Rebellion’, pp. 206–318. 103 Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 55. 104 Hulme defended the Poets’ Club formal dress code in a letter to the New Age. See ‘Belated Romanticism’, NA, 4.17 (18 February 1909), 350. 105 ‘There was also a lot of talk and practice among us, Storer leading it chiefly, of what we called the Image.’ F. S. Flint, ‘The History of Imagism’, The Egoist, 5.2 (1 May 1915), 70–71 (p. 71). 106 Donald Davie, The Purity of Diction in English Verse (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 99. 107 Christos Hadjiyiannis makes this point in, ‘The Beginnings of Imagism’, Networks and Archives of Modernism. Spec. issue of Global Review, 1.1 (2013), 141–64 (p. 143). 108 Griffin, Modernism and Fascism; Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995).

2

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

Hulme’s thought thus united vitalism with a desire for conceptual order, anarchism with conservatism, and individualism with a sense of an overarching moral structure. His writing correspondingly had complex, sometimes surprising affinities with that of contemporaries on both the radical left and right. This chapter compares his thinking with that of A. R. Orage, his editor at the socialist New Age, whose writing similarly described the emergence of human consciousness as a process of mental abstraction – in some ways impoverishment – running parallel with the emergence of similarly abstracting social processes and structures. A spiritual and social utopian, Orage pursued a form of intuitive, penetrating non-rational consciousness to preserve a heightened sense of individual vitality and recommended an overarching politics of social myth to contain and intensify that individuality. This worldview shaped a kind of socialism that was pluralist, communitarian and guild-based, seeking a guaranteed quality of selfhood by binding individuals together within a state. Moreover, this philosophy had a conservative dimension: before Hulme had stated his belief in Original Sin, Orage had already described man as a fixed species, subject to a kind of Fall, aspiring hopelessly, but worthily, to a higher condition. His socialism was aspirational but also pessimistic: the human struggle towards self-betterment, whether through psychological revelation or the eradication of economic deprivation, was an ennobling one. Orage’s thinking is remarkably close both to Bergsonian vitalism, in its account of an intuitive substratum to consciousness, and to Hulme’s conservative tendency, in its account of man’s fallen state. This double resemblance is brought out if one considers Orage’s spiritual and political ideas together with Hulme’s earliest articles on Bergson and forms of philosophical pluralism – ideas that naturally appealed to Orage and his circle and made the New Age a suitable venue for their publication. Moreover, these pieces already contained the seeds of Hulme’s

58

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

conservatism, which in turned paralleled similar conservative and religious tendencies in Orage’s thinking.

Modernism versus socialism? The extent of Orage’s sympathy with Hulme’s ideas has been obscured by recent accounts that have stressed the ideological differences of modernists and socialists. For example, Imagism had connections with two journals in Britain: the socialist New Age, in which the as yet unnamed aesthetic was developed by Flint, Hulme and Pound from 1908 to 1913, and the anarchistic New Freewoman (later The Egoist) edited by Dora Marsden, in which Pound, as literary editor, promoted the Imagistes from Autumn 1913.1 Although the earliest anticipations of Imagism appear in the New Age, it has been argued – for example, by Ann Ardis – that the movement was never at home in this socialist venue.2 Instead, it is suggested that Pound’s affiliation with the New Freewoman/Egoist from 1913 brought out Imagism’s essentially anarchistic ethos.3 Others cite this ideological commitment to explain why Imagism and, later, Vorticism were subject to attack by socialist commentators at the New Age.4 By emphasizing a period of bad relations with the New Age, this argument downplays Pound’s long-term involvement with the journal, his sympathy with its Ruskinian socialism and his greater proximity, as a Neoplatonist, to Orage’s spiritual interests rather than to the Egoist’s Stirnerian worldview.5 Regardless of this later debate about Pound’s shifting affiliations, this chapter seeks to situate Hulme’s theory of the image in his 1909 New Age essays, in discourse with New Age ideas regarding the individual and society. This does not preclude the identification of Hulme’s ‘imagist aesthetic’ as ‘individualist’, to use Michael Levenson’s term from his influential account of early modernism.6 Looking back on his New Age editorship, Orage recalled that ‘the Socialists of those days were, in practice, individualists to a man’.7 The New Age was conceived as a forum for alternative socialist thinking beyond Fabian orthodoxy, including various currents of libertarianism. The editors state in their first leader that ‘Socialism as a means to the intensification of man is even more necessary than Socialism as a means to the abolition of economic poverty.’8 This position was consistent with a Ruskinian outlook, but it also brought the goal of ‘self-realisation’ radically up to date, as seen in the journal’s interest in writers such as Shaw, Ibsen, Blavatsky, Stirner, Bergson and Nietzsche, to name just a few. Orage was in the first rank of the fight to achieve spiritual

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

59

growth rather than mere economic reform. All the evidence indicates that he shaped his politics according to a psychological goal – a non-rational, intuitive form of consciousness, defined in terms that mingled a variety of spiritual ideas, evolutionary psychology and the Nietzschean theory of the Übermenschen. His attempt to define a form of ‘immanent transcendence’ dominates his writing and brought him very close to the interests of Hulme, who had earlier pursued a form of Nietzschean perspectivism and by 1909 was writing on Bergson. The overlap between modernist aesthetics and various forms of spiritual and psychological enquiry at the turn of the century is well-documented, and against this background, we can see specific echoes between Orage’s project as writer and editor, and Hulme’s interest in the roots of aesthetic and political principles in forms of non-rational consciousness.9 Orage was never a Bergsonian – while his New Age pieces frequently cite Nietzsche, Bergson’s name scarcely appears.10 However, it is possible to show how the confluence of theosophical, Eastern, American transcendentalist and broadly Romantic thinking in progressive circles generated a very similar set of terms to those employed by Bergson. Consequently, in the context of the New Age, Hulme’s Bergsonian writing seems to echo socialist rhetoric regarding the cultivation of individuality in an age of mass politics. It has become a commonplace that the radical individualism of ‘early modernism’ was followed by a turn rightwards into ‘high modernism’.11 Hulme is often cited as a paradigmatic case, as in 1911–1912, he declared himself a ‘Tory’, a role that would seem to identify him even more clearly as an ‘enemy of the New Age’.12 This chapter seeks to qualify this view on several grounds. Not only did Hulme’s Tory attitude develop logically from his earlier work, but, more pertinently, even when declaring his conservatism, Hulme remained in many respects close to Orage’s worldview. Here I respond to Wallace Martin’s 1967 study, which presents Orage and Hulme, along with the New Age’s foreign correspondent J. M. Kennedy, and the Guild Socialist critic Ramiro de Maeztu, as collaborators in the development of a ‘conservative philosophy’.13 In Martin’s view, this group shared ‘ethical’ principles that informed both Guild Socialism and Toryism of Hulme or Kennedy. Martin makes this case by tracing the use of certain phrases and ideas in the New Age, particularly in the period of 1911–1912. These include the idea that ‘Man is a fixed species’, references to the doctrine of Original Sin and the Fall, a hostility to Rousseau, humanitarianism, the rights of man, abstract values of liberty, fraternity, equality and a rejection of the view of evolution and human progress as identical.14 Such ideas have often been noted in Hulme’s polemical writing of 1912, but, as Martin shows, Orage had voiced them first in 1911. Martin provides useful leads here, but his account

60

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

lacks context. For example, he perceives Orage’s 1911–1912 development of a ‘conservative philosophy’ as a sudden and unexplained change of heart, akin to Hulme’s purported Tory conversion – in Orage’s case from the progressive left to the ‘classicist’ ethics of Guild Socialism. In fact, neither Orage nor Hulme changed their position suddenly. Rather, their statements on human nature in 1911–1912 reflect long-term intellectual trajectories, drawing on a pool of similar ideas, emanating particularly from Bergson and Nietzsche. While critics continue to discuss the echoes between Imagism and the New Age’s rejection of liberalism, none has really established the background to Orage and Hulme’s apparent affinities.15 This chapter challenges the idea that an ideological gulf divided the New Age staff from ‘the modernist avant-garde’, via an expansion and clarification of Martin’s discussion of Hulme and Orage’s shared ideas. The two questions addressed here are: first, how far did Orage’s interest in spiritual illumination resemble Hulme’s ‘early modernist’ imagism, and second, how far did his view of ‘man as a fixed species’ connect with Hulme’s ‘high modernist’ Toryism? In answering, we can begin to see the continuities between the two stages in question. As they prove to be integrated in a consistent worldview, they are best seen through a roughly chronological account of Orage’s thought, touching on connections with Hulme when relevant.

Illumination/Imagism Orage’s vitalist politics was shaped by readings of Ruskin, Morris, Carpenter, Plato, various theosophical texts and Nietzsche, from which he derived a complex theory of spiritual evolution.16 This underpinned his notion of the individual’s relation to society and the state. An overlap in Orage and Hulme’s sources and terminology reflects the blurred Edwardian fields of occult, psychological and philosophical enquiry. The spiritual dimension of New Age socialism is under-explored in many studies of the journal, perhaps reflecting scholarly reluctance to broach the subject of the occult. Broad accounts of British occultism by Janet Oppenheim and Alex Owen shed some light, while literary histories centring on Pound, including those by Leon Surette and Demetres Tryphonopoulos, provide relevant material.17 They highlight Orage’s important role in discussions between Pound and occultists such as G. R. S. Mead, Orage’s collaborator and publisher at the Theosophical Review and The Quest, and Allen Upward, whom Orage invited to write for the New Age, and whom Pound identified as one of the Imagist group.18

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

61

Owen has discussed Edwardian theosophy via a larger thesis that such fin-de-siècle speculations reflect a widespread Durkheimian ‘disenchantment’ in a secular age.19 In her view, Bergsonian vitalism was one manifestation of this larger effect and thus can be treated alongside theosophy.20 This vitalism on the other hand influenced the theological modernist movement in both the Catholic and Anglican churches.21 The common ground of these enquiries, though very different in intellectual profile, was to reconcile spiritual faith with a materialist age. Their ideas thus fit into a much larger intellectual history of the kind explored by Stuart Hughes, John Burrow and Frank Turner.22 Burrow identifies a process whereby materialistic monism blurs into mysticism or vitalism: ‘much might depend on tone and diction; an emotional tremor in the prose, a fit of unguarded exaltation, could turn a reductive materialism into a vitalist monism or even an enthusiastic pantheism’.23 Such an ambiguity occurs in a mass of Edwardian writing. As Peter Liebregts says of Pound’s synthesis of scientific and mystical language, ‘this uncertainty about the ontological status of the Hypostasis is a deliberate choice [leaving] unanswered the question whether the attainment of Nous by man in a moment of intuition was a subjective or objective experience’.24 Borrowing Robert Musil’s phrase ‘daylight mysticism’ (also used by Judith Ryan), Patricia Rae suggests that Imagism is a ‘daylight Symbolism’: using ‘the new psychology’ Hulme and Pound ‘redescribe the moment of “illumination” or “epiphany” with which the creative activity began’.25 This term also helps explain how Hulme, whose attitude to the occult can be extrapolated from his attack on the ‘spilt religion’, went through a stage of Bergsonism, so close in structure and vocabulary to Neoplatonic thinking. For Hulme, Bergson’s philosophy was attractive for its empirical credentials, but he lost enthusiasm on seeing it contaminated by mystic, pantheistic and progressive interpretations. Ferguson rightly notes links between socialism and mysticism in ‘the atmosphere of idealism the air of which Hulme must have breathed every day of his life after settling in London, and against which he came to pose, with increasing ferocity, a scepticism that would lead him as far as possible in the opposite direction’.26 However, many of his friends, including those with whom he forged an austere, classical aesthetic, retained this spiritual outlook.27 Hulme’s ‘daylight symbolism’ remained on the borderline with a literary occultism that found, as Pound put it, ‘signs of gods’ in ‘the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe’.28 Pound’s association with the Egoist did not diminish the Neoplatonic content of his thought, something that Levenson, among others, plays down.29

62

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

As Hulme stated, there was a constant danger of confusing quite technical philosophy with less definite forms of mysticism, something he took action to prevent.30 Despite this, his work has since been subject to this confusion in criticism, as seen in the long-standing argument that he was essentially a romantic, first advanced in Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image (1957). Rae provides the most effective rebuttal by distinguishing between mysticism and Hulme’s roots in vitalist and pragmatic philosophy. She identifies one example of this contrast in modernist participation in the Quest Society, an offshoot of the Theosophical Society, for whose journal, The Quest, Pound wrote his 1912 article ‘Psychology and Troubadours’, and to whose members Hulme, Pound and Wyndham Lewis lectured in January 1914.31 Modernists’ involvement with this group reflected the spiritualist element of their milieu and possibly resulted from Orage’s close friendship with its president, G. R. S. Mead. Distinguishing subsets of discussion within the Quest network, Rae identifies its modernist participants with an effort, akin to that members including Émile Boutroux, William James or Bergson, to establish a ‘this-worldly’ value in mystical perception. Another faction within the group – ‘dogmatic mystics’ like Evelyn Underhill and A. H. Ward – ‘[kept] alive a “romantic” account of creativity’, but the distinctly ‘empiricist’ contingent of Boutroux and James, were ‘careful to avoid knowledge claims’ and ‘[tried] to give a scientific account of the same activity’.32 This chapter asks why, if Orage and Hulme fell on different sides of this divide, their arguments bear such a resemblance. This may simply reflect the often confusing exchange of ideas between the two worldviews. But to call Orage a naïve romantic does not do him justice. His account of illumination as a kind of psychological reflexivity, occurring on the immanent plane, has much in common with Hulme’s ‘daylight symbolism’, to use Rae’s phrase. Moreover, during the period of this study at least, his beliefs were kept in check by a kind of scepticism, whereby he rejected spiritual dogma, insisting that belief was merely a ‘necessary assumption’ for life.33 Martin is right in saying that For about thirteen years (1907–1920) Orage remained committed to a position approximating Vaihinger’s ‘as if ’: he treated the existence of God and the soul as ‘necessary assumptions’, their necessity being proved by experience, but denied the existence of any empirical evidence or compelling logic that would confirm them. In forsaking the editorship of The New Age in 1922 to study with Gurdjieff, Orage ended, or attempted to end, a prolonged suspension of belief which he had found difficult to sustain.34

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

63

During this period, Orage’s ‘necessary assumptions’, with their strong echo not only of the neo-Kantian, Hans Vaihinger, but also of William James’s ‘Will to Believe’, served as a kind of frame for his account of human nature. His enthusiasm for writers like Irving Babbitt, Georges Sorel and Benedetto Croce indicates how close he came to views taken by Hulme, and indeed later by Eliot.35 Indeed, Orage’s form of spiritualism resembles a system of what James called ‘over-beliefs’, and what Orage himself called elsewhere ‘enduring illusions’, which bring his position very close to a pragmatic view of human conduct.36 Making this case entails a departure from the New Age as a primary text in order to reconstruct Orage’s thinking over a longer period. He began developing these ideas much earlier, in his column for the Labour Leader. Here, he concentrated on literary criticism, an important component of which was his belief in the value of free verse. His appreciation of a poetry that sought to capture an intuitive, monistic spirit, unifying mind and body, object and subject, anticipated the similar ambitions of Imagism, conceived by Hulme under the influence of Bergson.

At the Labour Leader, 1895–1897 Orage began his journalistic career as literary critic for Keir Hardie’s Labour Leader.37 His writing here, from 1895 to 1897, reflects above all an enthusiasm for the poetry of Edward Carpenter and Walt Whitman. One of the earliest readers of Leaves of Grass in England, Carpenter was profoundly influenced by Whitman’s record of the ‘simple separate person’, ‘contain[ing] multitudes’.38 He attempted in his major work, the long poem ‘Towards Democracy’ (1883–1902), to transcribe his own epiphanic vision, connecting the individual consciousness with a ‘universal mind’. Socialists took up the idea enthusiastically as a vision of union between the one and the many: ‘Towards Democracy’, in its numerous editions, served as something of a bible for young, provincial socialists. Orage came under its spell, as he told Carpenter in a private letter.39 The impact of these ideas sheds light on all of Orage’s subsequent work. In a long article on Carpenter’s poetry, he wrote: The universal must include Humanity – the heart of man is one with the whole of nature – the spirit of the trees and flowers of Storm und Drang [sic] are his spirit also, for man ‘part of all that he has seen’ […]. Let the poet now gather together the threads of myriad nature and twist them, twine them, into the universal.40

64

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Orage presents his commentary on Carpenter’s work not merely as literary criticism, but as an appreciation of a worldview: ‘The human mind cannot be expressed except artistically – for art is expression, and expression is art – and to define poetry as “artistic expression” is to […] introduce […] sectarianism into a conception of the absolute.’41 The New Age’s ‘resistance to specialization’ – its desire to link politics, art, literature and philosophy – which Ann Ardis identifies with a Ruskinian project of cultural integration also owes much to this Neoplatonic belief in the synthesis of human endeavour towards an ultimate spiritual unity.42 Taste in literature was always for Orage one facet of a larger project: To bring all facts into relation with the human mind by expressing one mind in relation with all facts; to knit men closer with themselves and nature by expressing nature in man; to electrify and vitalize the dormant nerves which connect the heart of Nature with her outlying limbs; to express the universal in terms of humanity – this is the function of the poet of Democracy.43

Mark Bevir has recounted how American transcendentalism affected the British Labour movement, dovetailing with European currents of romanticism from which the movement first sprang.44 The romantic tradition in Britain came close to deifying nature, an idea expressed by Ruskin, for example in comments like: ‘God paints the clouds and shapes the moss-fibres that men may be happy in seeing him in his work.’45 However, Bevir argues, ‘whilst British romantics typically thought nature would inspire the imaginative faculty within men, or at most point towards the divine, American romantics typically believed God and nature were co-extensive’. This is an important point, marking a movement on a spectrum from theistic dualism towards what Bevir calls an ‘immanentist spiritualism’, or to use another term, monism.46 Precise distinctions are difficult to draw regarding such loose schools of thought, but Transcendentalism was clearly characterized by a particularly strong ‘belief in a God present throughout the world’, which reflected its unique roots in Unitarianism and frontier individualism.47 Returning to England through Carpenter, among others, ‘it reappeared in the idea of socialism as a new religion […] involving a new personal life’.48 Orage’s socialism is clearly responsive to this movement of ideas.49 This religiosity was one side of a febrile Edwardian socialism. In the same articles, Orage recommended that socialists read Marx, focusing on the first nine chapters of Das Kapital, on the theory of surplus value.50 Elsewhere, he argues against commercialism and in favour of craftsmanship, clearly channelling

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

65

Morris and Ruskin.51 He identifies with the New Woman movement.52 There is little specific talk of political practice so far, but the sympathies seem to lie with Morris in terms of cultural criticism, with Carpenter in terms of spiritual needs, and with Marx in terms of how these goals are to be attained. Some critics have detected a shift of allegiance from spiritual to economic priorities in Orage’s 1897 remark ‘Carpenter without Karl Marx is useless’.53 Indeed, the doctrine of surplus value remained central to Orage’s thinking, as indicated by his recurring New Age motto ‘economics precedes politics’, and his later support for the theory of Social Credit, which had much in common with Marxian economics. However, these ideas did not conflict with his earlier commitment to Carpenter’s religious outlook, but merely qualified it. Orage’s full remark ran, ‘Carpenter without Karl Marx is useless. Each is necessary to explain the other.’ By 1907, he would write, ‘the politicians may make socialism, but such a spirit as Carpenter’s is required to make socialists.’54 Moreover, Orage clearly disregarded several of Marx’s prejudices: as literary critic, it was his job to treat the cultural ‘superstructure’ as a socialist concern, and he was frankly utopian, admiring the alternative futures imagined by Carpenter, Morris, Wells and various others. The above interests seem distant from Hulme’s, not least in their optimistic spirit. However, Orage’s mystical ideas would develop towards a more pragmatic view of religious experience. A foreshadowing of this is apparent in Orage’s discussion of Shaw’s 1897 essay ‘The Illusions of Socialism’, written for Carpenter’s 1897 anthology Forecasts of the Coming Century. Orage notes appreciatively Shaw’s provocative assertion that socialism must grasp how Man ‘becomes what he imagines’: he is shaped by ‘illusions’, either ‘flattering’ or ‘necessary’.55 The myth that most excited socialist sentiment, the narrative of the class war, with its images of stoic suffering, noble struggle, happy endings and retributive justice, was just such a fiction.56 Thus, the egoism of Orage’s Whitmanian or occult vision was touched by an ironic, Shavian sense that human lives were shaped by ‘flattering illusions’, that man is self-created, not in a magical sense, but as a sociological function. As Gareth Griffith puts it, this theory of illusions represented an ‘alternative dimension’ to Shaw’s Fabian commitment: the best illusions complemented and supported the actual, more prosaic, practice of socialist reform. Yet, ‘like Sorel later, [he] saw the greatness of Marxism in terms of the social poetry embedded in its central myths’.57 As we shall see, this would bring Orage close to Hulme in the view of philosophy as a matter of temperament and perspective rather than verifiable truth.

66

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Consciousness without thought Orage’s reading of Whitman and Carpenter in turn introduced him to a range of Vedantic, Neoplatonic, hermetic and gnostic traditions, which had long informed European and American romanticism.58 The specific roots of his monism are too various to recount. The basic pattern of his thinking can be found in his most immediate source, Carpenter, whose theory of history begins to show the shared ground between Orage and Hulme in forms of anti-intellectualism, in a belief in other forms of consciousness apart from ratiocination. Carpenter’s theory, set out in his lecture ‘Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure’ (1889), was accused of naïve Hegelianism by the Fabian audience which attended his paper.59 Numerous progressive writers of the time used variations on the Hegelian philosophy of history: for example, it underpinned much of the theorizing of the New Liberalism. But the Fabians, while characteristically hostile to Carpenter’s romanticism, missed the point, since his argument differed significantly from that of ‘absolute idealists’. For Hegel, the relationship between ‘objective’ history and the subjective development of the individual consciousness (‘spirit’) was an intimate one; this is a central thesis in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Other great models for progressive historiography, such as Comte or Spencer, also highlighted the role of reason in the advance of mankind towards a perfected state. Scholars have shown in depth how the Edwardian liberal-left merged such neo-Idealist sources with teleological adaptations of Darwinian evolutionary theory in a potent restatement of ‘Whig history’.60 In what follows we will see how Orage, like Carpenter, subscribed to a philosophy of spiritual evolution that, from a distance, resembles such theories. But we must bear in mind their insistence on rooting this evolution in a ‘monistic idealism’, in other words, in a kind of non-rational pantheism.61 Hulme, like Orage, refuses to accept the bloodless, chess-game progressivism of academic Idealism. Their writings constantly look to the body; anti-intellectualist, they deny the conscious mind its rationalist supremacy. In politics too, they reject the clean, pure lines of the New Liberal or Fabian intellect. In contrast to the neo-Hegelians, Carpenter treats self-consciousness as a ‘disease’ of civilization. He is critical of forms of logic that correlate with the development of law and property. Health is defined as unity of mind and body; illness in contrast is disunity: he sees the development of reason as a psychological ‘fall’. ‘In the animals consciousness has never returned upon itself. It radiates easily outwards […] when man first appears […] and even up to the

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

67

threshold of […] civilisation, there is much to show […] he should […] still be classed with the animals [but] to attain self-knowledge man must fall; he must become less than his true self; he must endue imperfection; division and strife must enter his nature.’62 Civilization is a temporary perversion, indicating the disunion of the outer self from the inner – the horrible dual self-consciousness – which is the means ultimately of a more perfect and conscious union that could ever have been realised without it […]. In order […] at this stage in his Evolution, to advance any farther, Man must first fall; in order to know, he must lose. In order to realise what Health is […] he must go through […]. Disease; in order to know the perfect social life […] he must learn the misery [of] mere individualism and greed.63

However, the Fall is a necessary experience, a phase in the growth of man towards a higher unity. This romantic narrative seems distant from Hulme, but it suggests the root of Orage’s affinity with Hulme: their shared interest in the doctrine of the Fall and the limits of human reason. These references to Christian doctrine to explain the evolution of the spirit, and more specifically the scale of difficulty it entailed, help explain Orage’s later agreement with Hulme that ‘man is a fixed species’.64 Carpenter’s description of non-rational ‘spiritual evolution’ is one of several contemporary theories that drew upon Neoplatonic and Vedantic ideas. The influential neo-Vedantic guru Swami Aurobindo, in his major work The Life Divine (1914–1919), would put the ideas into a remarkably similar form.65 Carpenter, Orage and Aurobindo all make reference to a process known as ‘involution’, preceding ‘evolution’.66 The shared cosmic narrative underlying this idea begins with a single energy penetrating into dead matter. Subsequently, the spirit rises through matter, creating various strata of life, to re-ascend to the absolute. The human state, including the Westernized rational ego, is part of the process of the spirit back towards reunification. This process differs from the ‘automatic’ development of Hegel, in that it is mysterious, difficult and prone to long delay. Carpenter’s theory is heavily influenced by Hindu thought; particularly in his elaboration of a theory whereby each ‘unit-man’ (Atman) carries in him a portion of the ‘mass-man’ (Brahman). To achieve the latter involved an elevation above the rational. Carpenter and Orage, following Emerson’s example, had studied the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. The higher state of mind entailed a kind of egoism that extended outwards, joining the individual and the other. Orage’s socialism is constructed on this principle. The task of intensifying individuals’ experience while drawing them together

68

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

within society is the overture and anticipation of a Neoplatonic gathering of the many into the one. This model of the ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ self remains important for Orage, and it is important to distinguish Orage here from other schools of ‘egoism’ such as Dora Marsden’s. Orage talked of a ‘curve’ of egoism going beyond a state of conscious individualism, as seen in extremis in Stirner, to a higher point, where the self and the universe were identified as facets of one reality.67 This state, however, was always deferred, elusive and rarely attainable by mankind, even momentarily. Rather than expecting this transcendence to arrive easily, we should accept its deferral beyond our understanding and seek merely to become ‘complete’ within the terms of human condition, as finite, rational selves. On achieving that maximum state of human selfhood, an elevation to a higher egoism may be possible, but it cannot be foreseen. Thus Orage acknowledges, in an article of 1913, what Dora Marsden called ‘egoism’; while he rejects it as a goal, he accepts it as a stage. The New Age’s objections to Pound’s affiliations with Marsden’s Egoist thus become clearer, though it seems clear that none of the Imagists fully subscribed to Stirner’s bleak, terminal solipsism. This Vedantic influence came to the fore after Carpenter’s 1890 trip to India, recorded in From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta (1891). Reviewed by Orage in 1896, this contains a key, influential passage in which Carpenter recounts his conversations with a holy man he met in Ceylon. This guru described a form of ‘consciousness without thought’, which marked the transcendence of mind from reason. It has something in common with the struggle to get beyond rational categories in Imagism. Consciousness without thought is comparable to Bergson’s notion of intuition or the élan vital. It is important to note how difficult such an insight is to achieve, in Carpenter’s view: If there is a higher form of consciousness attainable by man […] it is probable […] that it is evolving and will evolve but slowly, and with many a slip and hesitant pause by the way […] progress in that region [is] slow and tentative and various, laborious, discontinuous, and uncertain. There is no sudden leap out of the back parlour onto Olympus; and the routes, when found, from one to the other, are long and bewildering in their variety.68

This contrasts with the ‘automatic’ progress of Hegel’s dialectic. It is a deeply mysterious process. It takes place firmly on the immanent plain: There is nothing abnormal or miraculous about the matter; […] the faculties acquired are, on the whole, the result of long evolution and training, and […] they have distinct laws and an order of their own.69

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

69

As an immanent process, it can be described in materialist terms: ‘Western science is envisaging the possibility of the existence in man of another consciousness of some kind, beside that with whose working we are familiar.’70 In his review, Orage identified this, of Carpenter’s books, as ‘perhaps the one most nearly connected, from a psychological point of view, with “Towards Democracy” ’, highlighting Carpenter’s discussion of ‘what has been called in the west “cosmic consciousness” – sut-chit-ánandra Brahm – [of which] all readers of Whitman and Carpenter are more or less dimly aware’.71 This was the experience of Brahman by a fully liberated yogi: the all-encompassing ego, able ‘to speak of the great operations of nature, the thunder, the wind, the shinings of the sun, etc., in the first person “I”, the identification with, or non-differentiation from, the universe’.72 This union between self and other is very close to the empathetic quality of Bergsonian intuition. So, Orage’s worldview differed from theism in being monist, but also from Hegelian monist idealism, in being anti-intellectualist. It proposed another realm of becoming beyond that of logic: ‘another consciousness of some kind, beside that with whose working we are familiar’.73 It also emphasized the difficulty in achieving this consciousness, the fact that it was inconceivable within the parameters of human thought, and its coming was a matter of unforeseeable, long-term evolution, combined to an uncertain degree with human will.

Consciousness: animal, human and superhuman In 1903, Orage and Holbrook Jackson established the Leeds Art Club, a group combining interests in socialism – particularly in the Guild idea – and forms of spiritual enquiry.74 Orage was also active in the Theosophical Society and delivered a series of lectures to local groups between 1904 and 1906, published in 1907 as Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superhuman. These make clear the persistent importance of his spiritual theories as he developed the basic principles of Guild Socialism. While Orage’s argument remains rooted in transcendentalism, he absorbs ideas from evolutionary psychology and from Nietzsche, thus coming remarkably close to the network of ideas that Hulme absorbed from Ribot and Gourmont. His book is also strikingly similar, in its figures of speech, to Henri Bergson’s ‘Introduction a la metaphysique’ (1901) (translated by Hulme as Introduction to Metaphysics in 1913). Orage presented four lectures: the first on consciousness in general and the rest on its animal, human and ‘superman’ forms. He is clearly responding to

70

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

the ‘Darwinian revolution’.75 He states that his task is to explore the question of whether the difference between animal and human consciousness is fundamental or relative, alluding to Darwin’s remark in The Descent of Man that ‘the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind but immensely in degree’.76 Darwin had hinted at the applications of natural selection to man since The Origin of Species (1859).77 He drew the above conclusion in as a corrective to naturalists, who ‘from being deeply impressed with the mental and spiritual powers of man, have divided the whole organic world into three kingdoms – the Human, the Animal, and the Vegetable, thus giving to man a separate kingdom’.78 This blurring of the Aristotelean scala naturae was a point of departure for both Orage and Hulme, as it was for many post-Darwinian intellectuals. By unsettling ‘idealistic morphology’, that is to say the belief in fixed species held by eighteenth-century taxonomists like Linneaus, Darwin set the ‘Great Chain of Being’ in motion.79 He argued that all species were in a constant state of gradual evolution, and thus the concept of ‘species’ was an artificial imposition on this state of flux. He thus renewed the Heraclitean philosophy of becoming as opposed to the Platonic philosophy of being, the static, divinely ordained hierarchy running from minerals through beasts and humans to angels. As Ernst Mayr puts it, ‘the fixed, essentialistic species was a fortress to be stormed and destroyed’.80 The debate regarding whether species were discontinuous, or ran together without divide, continued in the writing of Huxley, William Bateson, Hugo de Vries and others, well into the twentieth century. Orage and Hulme return repeatedly to this question of division and barriers, separating matter and life, the animal, the human and divine. It provides further context for Hulme’s remarks on ‘spilt religion’ and his attempt in 1915 to distinguish separate spheres of speculation – the non-organic, vital and theological.81 Orage’s first lecture welcomes the theory of evolution, locating the whole range of spiritual growth on one plane: ‘a perfectly continuous and essentially similar underlying consciousness common to all living things, visible and invisible’.82 This, only by the particularized activities of beings becomes defined and limited into specifically human, animal, vegetable modes. Before being thus limited it is universal, undifferentiated, simple and pure. After limitation it is still that’.83

Monism, the incorporation of the divine into the earth, was what Hulme would revile in 1912 as ‘spilt religion’.84 Yet Orage’s monism is complicated, and he goes on, like Hulme, to seek new forms of discrimination, new barriers. While insisting on the unity of all energies, he indicates his hope for an ‘immanent transcendence’: ‘Thinking, feeling, acting are fundamentally the same for

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

71

animal, human, and superman.’85 While Orage accepts Darwin’s point that there is no difference ‘of either degree or kind’ in the mental substance of animal and human consciousness, but suggests that ‘the difference lies in the addition […] of something that experiences, and […] of a something which contemplates both the experienced and the fictitious experiencer’. Rather than a difference of degree, or quality, in the stuff involved, the change is defined in terms of reflexivity, as ‘awareness meet[ing] awareness’.86 Here, Orage is adapting an idea from evolutionary psychology, this time through his reading of Richard Bucke’s book Cosmic Consciousness (1902). David Thatcher rightly suggests that this was a key text for Orage and an important model for his 1907 book.87 Bucke, a close friend of both Whitman and Carpenter, was Superintendent of a Canadian mental asylum. Throughout his medical training, partly undertaken in Europe, he took an interest in philosophical matters and later sought in several books to explain Whitman’s transcendentalism in psychological terms.88 Cosmic Consciousness was directly inspired by Carpenter’s From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta and elaborated on his account of ‘consciousness without thought’ using evolutionary theory.89 Bucke’s work was (and remains) a hugely influential book in spiritualist circles and was cited by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).90 For Orage, it was an important source for his personal attempt to reconcile spirit and matter. Bucke’s book in turn is indebted to the evolutionary psychology of Romanes’s works, particularly Mental Evolution in Animals (1883) and Mental Evolution in Man (1888), discussed in earlier chapters. Bucke sought not only ‘to give an idea of this vast evolution of mental phenomena from its beginning in far off geologic ages down to the latest phases reached by our own race’, but to go further, tracing the movement from human to ‘cosmic’ consciousness.91 Bucke observes ‘the seeming hiatus between Simple and Self Consciousness’, adding that ‘the deep chasm or ravine upon one side of which roams the brute while on the other dwell man […] has only now been made safely passable by the lamented […] Romanes’.92 By analogy with that hiatus, there was another, between the human and the ‘cosmic’, which could be explored similarly through the accumulation of anecdotal evidence. Romanes described the development of awareness from nervous instinct, to conscious action, to self-conscious volitional action – in other words, to ‘awareness of awareness’. This process distinguishes humans from animals. Bucke extrapolated from this process the possibility of a higher level of consciousness, an ‘awareness of awareness of awareness’, wherein the ‘illuminated’ seer can step away once again and observe the human observing itself; this was his version of Carpenter’s ‘consciousness without

72

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

thought’.93 Bucke’s theory of the leap between human and cosmic consciousness clearly informed Orage’s 1907 lectures. I want to suggest some similarities with the forms of cognition involved in Hulme’s Imagist theory. As we have seen, Romanes also provided some of the basic structure of Théodule Ribot’s L’Évolution des idées générales (1897), and subsequently for the work of Ribot’s colleague and collaborator, Henri Bergson. Orage is one of many writers to refer to categories of ‘Instinct’, ‘Reason’ and ‘Intuition’.94 These categories correlate with the stages of consciousness discussed above and are the shared ground of fin-de-siècle mysticism and evolutionary psychology, and underpin imagism, in its Hulmean form at least. They occur in L’Évolution créatrice (1907), in phrasing that seems particularly indebted to Ribot, as well, perhaps, as reflecting Bergson’s interest in Neoplatonism.95 Not only for romantics like Carpenter, but for those working in academic psychology, the instinctive life of animals represented a stage of unity, and the human state a division between mind and body. Moreover, there emerged a third stage, a notion of a higher, intuitive life: a renewed unity. As noted in Chapter 1, Ribot identified forms of creative consciousness exempt from mechanistic materialism: these came close to Bergson’s notion of intuition and the élan vital.96 Both informed Hulme’s literary aesthetic, as they described the emergence of conceptual and then intuitive thought through the merging of impressions or images. The ‘image’ too can be seen in Romanes. To discuss the development from percept, the basis of animal consciousness, to concept, that of human consciousness, he invented the intermediate term ‘recept’: the image as recorded and recalled to the mind.97 Ribot’s account of the formation of concepts out of images, in its synthesis of associationist philosophy with evolutionary psychology, owed much to this earlier theory. Bucke discusses concept formation in a very similar way, citing Romanes.98 The hierarchy of instinct, reason and intuition were by 1914 also appearing in neo-Vedantic writings by Sri Aurobindo and other thinkers in the New Thought and theosophical movements. Aurobindo explicitly merged Nietzsche and Bergson in a synthesis with Eastern religious beliefs.99 These writings post-date much of Orage’s writing on this subject, but they show how Hulme’s Bergsonian and Nietzschean interests brought him close in some areas to Orage’s interest in spiritual evolution. Orage’s account omits much of the technical argument, but the theory of reflexivity remains, condensed to a single metaphor. Consciousness is compared to a plane of sensitive, photographic paper. An animal’s consciousness consists of a single plane of this paper, which records sense impressions without knowing it. As Orage puts it, ‘there can be a memory without a rememberer’.100 In human consciousness, this sensitive paper is folded over to touch itself: thus, it receives

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

73

impressions of its own impressions: it is aware of its own awareness. Orage’s image of folding paper correlates with what Romanes calls the emergence of ‘recepts’: the recollection and observation of sense impressions. This is also reminiscent of Bergson’s account of consciousness as memory in Matière et mémoire (1896). Orage goes on to insist that the workings of human reason, however sophisticated, can never progress beyond certain bounds. Limited as it is to a single level of reflexivity, the mind has just enough consciousness to perform acts of conceptualization, but by no means to verify those abstract processes against any ultimate truth. This is the human condition: finite and flawed, just as Hulme would later put it. In contrast, the state of the ‘superman’ can only be imagined. It would be achieved, in Orage’s view, by folding the plane of consciousness a second time, to achieve an ‘awareness of awareness of awareness’, whereby one could see the operations of one’s mind from a step removed. As far as it can be imagined, it is akin to the ‘consciousness without thought’ described by Carpenter. ‘Egoity’ is to be dispensed with. The self-inspecting mind is replaced by an intuitive, united mind. But, just as in Carpenter’s account, this state is intensely difficult to achieve. The ‘superman’ state cannot be defined or anticipated. Orage can only approach it obliquely through images: he describes it as a form of ‘waking’ from sleep, or a standing aside, an ‘ecstasis’ or ‘winged thought’.101 Orage’s account of consciousness is remarkably similar to that of Henri Bergson. The distinctions between Instinct, Reason and Intuition, particularly the contrast between abstract logic and the ecstasis of intuition, all have parallels in Bergson’s writings. Orage’s ‘winged thought’ is particularly reminiscent of Bergson’s élan vital. It seems likely that this was less a case of direct influence than of shared sources.102 Although Orage’s argument lacks Bergson’s sophistication, rejecting technical terms in favour of a ‘creative’ explanation, using ‘imagery’ to present his argument, the picture that he develops is extremely close to Bergsonian vitalism. Conversely, it is his use of imagery that makes this comparison so striking to students of modernist poetry; for just as Bergson was well known for studding his often abstruse argumentation with a vivid metaphor, so Orage advances his argument largely through a series of images: the folding of paper, the rings of a tree, the acorn and the oak-tree. In this way, Orage’s whole book is strikingly reminiscent of the Introduction to Metaphysics as translated by Hulme. Moreover, the images that Orage uses come close to Hulme’s argument for imagism in verse. He writes, ‘there is safety in numbers of images. A number of images combined invoke the idea, negate each other, and dissolve, leaving the idea behind’.103 Compare this to Bergson’s famous argument, translated by Hulme: ‘No one image can replace the intuition of duration, but many diverse

74

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

images, borrowed from very diverse 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.’104 Like the Imagists, Orage observes the act of association, the conjunction of impressions, and brings this to surface consciousness. Orage arrived at this method independently of Bergson, but after the latter’s rise to fame in England, many spiritualists were drawn to Bergsonian vitalism and identified it with the theory of cosmic consciousness formulated earlier by Carpenter and Bucke. In fact, Carpenter was annoyed to have his book The Art of Creation (1905) compared to Bergson’s philosophy, which he had not consulted at that time. He later accepted the comparison, as Sheila Rowbotham has noted, and discussed it in The Drama of Life and Death in 1912.105 At the same time, Orage from early on differed from Bergson. Tellingly, he would later criticize the French philosopher for making the attainment of ‘intuition’ too easy. What is in Orage’s view a vexed, deferred illumination, only fully achievable through an extinction of the human ego, becomes in Bergson’s hands (and those of his cruder followers) a cosily reassuring undercurrent in the mind of every individual. Bergson suggests that we can sit back, confident of our progress towards the infinite, while routinely accessing the ‘stream of consciousness’ as a passenger may put his head out of the railway carriage window. Orage argues that the ease with which Bergson could recommend this reflected his error of confusing the lower instinctive life of animals (more easily accessible to humans, as Orage points out) with the higher and more elusive sphere of intuition.106 This was in line with Hulme’s criticism of Bergson, as we shall see in the next chapter. Orage is emphatic about the difficulty of attaining ‘cosmic consciousness’. To achieve this state in its fullest form would be to cease being human; just as an animal, while touched at moments with human-like consciousness, would cease to be an animal if it maintained that level of understanding continually. The next stage of reflexivity cannot be imagined: this would be like ‘standing on one’s own shoulders’. In these conditions, the path to ‘superman’ consciousness requires aeons of evolution, with an uncertain degree of precipitation by human will.

At the New Age This reconstruction of Orage’s early thinking reveals how close his sources were to those of the incipient Imagist aesthetic. It was in this spirit that Orage took over as New Age editor, making the journal an ideal venue for Hulme’s

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

75

first contributions in 1909. Leaving Leeds for London in 1907, Orage first worked with Holbrook Jackson in forming the Fabian Arts Society, an attempt to recreate the Leeds Art Club in the capital, before acquiring the New Age.107 As co-editor with Jackson, Orage remained involved in both occult and socialist circles. He was a regular contributor to the Theosophical Review and had by now written two books on Nietzsche (1906 and 1907), as well as publishing his lectures on the nature of consciousness (1907).108 At the same time, he was sharing a flat with Arthur Penty, his colleague from the Leeds Art Club, who was writing his seminal text, The Restoration of the Guild System (1906). The Guild idea had been a favourite subject of discussion, alongside spiritual matters, at the Leeds meetings, and Orage gave his support to Penty’s project in a notable 1907 article for the Contemporary Review.109 Penty’s vision of this system was deeply medievalist. He did not follow Orage’s spiritual journey through Eastern religion and theosophy; rather, his worldview tended towards Catholicism. In contrast, Orage was able to draw on the Guild idea to politicize his theory of mind. His socialism in 1907 was a matter of psychological growth as much as economic distribution, and the best system to achieve this was not a centralized bureaucracy, but a system of local, self-governing guilds.110 The preface to Penty’s 1906 book provides an index of his and Orage’s shared sources, citing Carlyle, Arnold and Carpenter.111 The last name provides perhaps the best clue to how Orage’s philosophy of mind connected to the revival of the Guild idea and how it set him against state socialism and the abstract vocabulary used by many Liberals and socialists. The New Liberal Idealists and the Marxists shared a confidence in the evolution of society according to rational laws, which could be charted in the past and anticipated in the future.112 This was accompanied, particularly in overlapping Fabian and New Liberal intellectual discourse, by a vision of a human intelligence guiding events through a centralized and elite government. Although common on the progressive left, for a certain kind of socialist this rationalism was offensive. Its certainties, its abstraction, its belief that an expert hand on a tiller could protect the interests of densely complex and sensitive human beings across the nation, offended the provincial and self-educated socialists who comprised the Independent Labour Party’s grassroots, in particular. They had absorbed their socialism together with a semi-religious rhetoric of self-improvement. The ‘religion of socialism’ was a well-known phenomenon in the popular Labour movement.113 Fabianism neglected such attendance to the spirit. The Leeds Arts Club, closely linked to the Leeds I.L.P., provides an extraordinary example of these priorities in its breadth of intellectual reference. This was, as Tom Steele

76

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

puts it, the ‘provincial avant-garde’.114 The New Age would provide a means to pursue this spiritual project at a national level. On leaving for London, Orage had set out to find ‘a new samurai’, an aristocracy of the spirit.115 I want to make some clarifications here regarding Orage’s politics. Tom Gibbons argues that Orage was an elitist, who invoked the Platonic Guardian class in much the same way as H. G. Wells or the Webbs.116 The latter, however, were advocates of a ‘technocracy’ imagining a class of rationalist governors, while Orage’s aristocracy would have freed themselves from this level of ratiocination. Pushing at the limits of human consciousness, they have more in common with Carpenter’s visionary elect than the practical, worldly minds of the Fabians. Moreover, Orage’s elite class are not governors: he explicitly rejected government by aristocracy.117 They were more in the line of spiritual elders whose influence was felt psychologically, not politically. It remains to be said that his aristocracy was meritocratic, and the ‘superman’ could arise from any background: a consoling, and intoxicating, thought for working-class writers like Flint, or Edwin Muir, who studied Nietzsche on Orage’s recommendation while working as a milkman in Glasgow.118 Second, Orage, it is often said, welcomed the elitism of eugenics. Tom Gibbons again suggests as much, as does Dan Stone, who seizes on a passing remark in Orage 1906 book on Nietzsche: ‘the superman, if he is to appear at all, must be bred’.119 Stone takes these words too literally. Orage’s comment comes in a discussion of psychology and on first glance is cryptic, but it is quite clear in his response elsewhere to the cruder eugenicists of his day that he found biological selection abhorrent: ‘we who take our Nietzsche as we take our […] Bhagavad Gita […] may quarrel over the precise significance to be attached to Nietzsche’s conception of the Superman, but there is one thing over which we do not quarrel. We do not regard the Superman as a problem of history or eugenics, and still less of politics or sociology’. These remarks come in a critical 1910 commentary on books by Anthony Ludovici (Who is to be Master of the World? (1909)) and J. M. Kennedy (Quintessence of Nietzsche (1910)), which, pursuing a fixed, central meaning to Nietzsche’s writings, made the mistake of treating him as a ‘biological philosopher’. Orage chastises their erroneous belief that the ‘wonderful myths’ invented by Nietzsche ‘to elevate man […] were true in fact’.120 The failure of Ludovici and Kennedy to comprehend Nietzsche’s mythopoeic quality helps explain their estrangement from British modernists, as I show in Chapters 4 and 5. Their misunderstanding troubled Orage: the problem lay, he conceded, with Nietzsche himself, partly in his suggestions that his work contained some extractable, ‘quintessential’

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

77

meaning; but also in his misguided comments on temporal affairs, in which he proved to be ‘a lyrical Bismarck’. Here, grappling with Nietzsche’s conspicuous antipathy for democratic and socialist politics, Orage deploys a theory gaining hold in the pre-war New Age (as discussed by Diane Milburn) that identified Nietzsche with German authoritarianism and bellicosity.121 However, Orage never ceased to find some value in the philosopher’s work: ‘As a political philosopher Nietzsche is ludicrous; as a critic of Socialism he is prejudiced and uninformed; but as a poet, as a psychologist, and above all as a preacher […] he belongs to the line of the major prophets, to the line of Isaiah and Koheleth.’122 The ‘breeding’ to which Orage refers in his own book on Nietzsche was not simply biological. It refers to an internal struggle for ‘evolution’ within the individual: the superman is ‘self-begotten from within the mind of man’.123 This seems to be a kind of Lamarckian notion that by refining one’s own consciousness through force of will, one is investing the following generations with the benefit of one’s struggle. The organism and its lineage can be improved through the psychological journey discussed above, not through genetic intervention. Having dispelled some of these confusions, which are understandable given the ubiquity (and, one must remember, variety) of elitist thinking on the Edwardian left, it is clearer that Orage’s Guild idea was in the ‘pluralist’ tradition, in that it recommended that communities and industries took charge of themselves as much as possible.124 This would prevent the reduction of the individual to a governed and waged unit in a much larger machine; it would prevent the soul-draining effects of capitalism and statism, both of which treated the worker as an abstract quantity of labour. In terms of language, it rejected the abstract terms of liberty and democracy, which had become empty symbols. Universal suffrage and welfare reform were superficial alterations of a fundamental slavery.

The radicalization of the New Age Orage and Jackson formed the Fabian Arts Society, with the support of Shaw, intending to reinstall the spirit of Ruskin and Morris in the intellectual heart of British socialism. More subtly, it would promote the matrix of radical ideas discussed in Leeds. The Fabians aimed to ‘permeate’ the British establishment with socialist values. Orage and Jackson turned this policy on its inventors, using the New Age to impart more radical ideas to a wide socialist readership.

78

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Outwardly, the journal paid homage to Fabian and Labour leaders, but its content represented a good cross-section of avant-garde discourse. Moreover, signs of frustration with the ‘Old Gang’ were apparent almost immediately: the first number included an appreciative report on Wells, a declared enemy of the Webbs. The New Age recounted his recent lecture, concerning his new book A Modern Utopia, noting several digs at the Fabian leaders.125 In the same issue, there began a series of articles by the resolute medievalist Penty, who had resigned from the Fabians shortly before.126 Shaw, as patron, expected this heterodoxy, considering the paper to be a controllable outlet for young and excitable voices. In the early months of Orage and Jackson’s editorship, such discussions were accompanied by dutiful avowals of loyalty and admiration for Fabian leaders. However, after Jackson left in 1908, Orage as sole editor began to steer the journal in a more radical direction. This shift reflected growing disappointment with the timidity of Labour MPs elected in 1906 and anger at the Fabians’ characteristic refusal to support the Railway Workers Strike on the grounds that it damaged the national economy.127 From 1907, the journal began supporting radical socialists standing in by-elections without the support of the parliamentary Labour Party. In particular, they promoted Victor Grayson, a charismatic speaker presented as the saviour of socialism. Elected for Colne Valley, Grayson outraged the Labour leadership in October 1908 by disrupting business in the House of Commons to protest at government inaction on unemployment. Expelled from the house, he denounced the Labour members as ‘traitors to their class’.128 Shortly afterwards, Orage invited Grayson to act as deputy editor for the New Age. This was a turning point for the journal. Its editorials frankly espoused ‘revolution’, defying Fabian and I.L.P. rebukes.129 One of Orage’s biographers has suggested that he saw in Grayson the embodiment of the Dionysian spirit that would upturn the carefully ordered rational forum of the House of Commons.130 This seems to have been the interpretation of Keir Hardie, who in early 1909 publicly attacked ‘the handful of irresponsibles who control the political policy of the New Age, most of them disciples of Nietzsche – the neurotic apostle of modern Anarchism’.131 From late 1908, Orage and his ally S. G. Hobson called for a Socialist Representation Committee that could operate independently of the Labour Party, and thus extricate socialist concerns from compromise with the Liberals. Hobson argued this case at the I.L.P. conference of early 1909, but key figures including Hardie and Macdonald quashed the proposal by threatening to resign if it was approved, leaving Hobson without support.132 Grayson could not fulfil his supporters’ hopes; he remained at the New Age for only a few months

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

79

before beginning a rapid decline into obscurity.133 Hobson soon left to work abroad for several months. The New Age’s first, failed interventions in national politics were fresh in Orage’s mind at the time of Hulme’s first contribution in July of that year.134 Lee Garver makes a strong case for reading Hulme’s 1909 articles in light of the New Age’s radicalisation, although their political bearing remains drily subtextual. Hulme later recalled that he was a socialist in his youth, and a vestige of this commitment may colour his 1909 writing, although so does a certain amused aloofness. Garver suggests that Hulme was ‘intrigued by the possibility of addressing and aligning himself with a large, radicalised working class readership’, elsewhere displaying a sympathy for ‘the suffragette’s […] path of direct confrontation’. What is clear is that Hulme was fascinated by disorder for its own sake, and enjoyed describing philosophic nominalism through provocative comparisons to radical causes. This metaphoric link results in ‘rhetorical affinities’ with New Age politics, if not a straightforward allegiance to a working class readership.135 Making no specific political comment or recommendation, Hulme instead reveals a conceptual affinity with his new publisher. Scholarly efforts to contextualize Hulme’s work within New Age discourse are useful, but rather than attempt to connect him with the ‘left’ as a simple category, we might apply Michael Freeden’s analysis of ideology, whereby similar concepts can occur within very different ‘ideas-environments’.136 Marc Stears has shown how this method clarifies the range of ideologies hosted at the New Age.137 In this case, the common element linking Hulme and Orage is a degree of anti-intellectualism, an interest in non-rational forms of cognition, and how they might correlate with forms of ideology. Hulme’s choice of subjects for his essays suggests he saw the political implications of vitalism: two of his 1909 articles deliberately engage with prominent politician–philosophers of the left, and their political subtext develops naturally.

Hulme’s articles of 1909 Hulme entered the New Age circle with what was ostensibly a review of William James’s A Pluralistic Universe but in fact dealt largely with Bergson. James’s book vividly described his delight in first reading Bergson, and Hulme recognized and expanded on this sentiment. In doing so, he took his place as the journal’s leading exponent of Bergsonism, or, as the headline to his piece called it, ‘The New Philosophy’. Several accounts had given Bergson’s work this tag, and Hulme

80

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

followed suit. In doing so, he was also conforming to the spirit of novelty that the journal cultivated. Alongside Hulme’s piece there appeared another, by M. D. Eder, entitled ‘The New Psychology’. Holbrook Jackson noted the prevalence of this ‘useful adjective’ in his study, The Eighteen-Nineties (1913).138 Novelty was linked rhetorically to the notion of ‘advanced thought’, which in turn seemed fundamentally linked to progressive ideology. Several contemporaries dubbed Bergson’s work ‘the New Philosophy’, the definite article reflecting Bergson’s impact in the popular mind.139 We have seen how close Bergson’s vitalism was to Orage’s theories of psychology. Bergsonism catered in France for much the same intellectual appetite fed in England by Carpenter and the theosophists. Hulme wrote: I felt the exhilaration that comes with the sudden change from a cramped and contracted to a free and expanded state of the same thing. It was an almost physical sense of exhilaration, a sudden expansion, a kind of mental explosion […] I had been released from a nightmare that had long troubled my mind.140

As R. C. Grogin puts it, a certain rhetoric marked the critical response to Bergson after 1907.141 It relied on certain key words – alongside ‘novelty’, commentators often spoke of ‘liberation’ and ‘exhilaration’. In describing the release from materialism, these terms could also invoke a myth of liberation as transcendence, echoing the political rhetoric of Orage and his colleagues. A few weeks later, Hulme began a series entitled ‘Searchers after Reality’, dealing with prominent philosophers of the day. The first piece responded to E. Belfort Bax, who had challenged Hulme in the letters page a few weeks before, contending that Bergson’s vitalism merely restated his own work dating back to the 1880s. Bax’s major work, The Roots of Reality, consisted of a largely Idealist argument, but one which hesitated to claim, as did Hegel, that rationalist philosophy provided a complete and exact system, the culmination and completion of the world spirit. Rather, Bax referred back to Kant’s principle of the ‘thing-in-itself ’, the unknowable realm that we glimpse only partially, through fundamentally limited sense apparatus. It was this self-imposed restriction that, Bax claimed, had anticipated Bergson’s élan vital, which similarly eluded conscious apprehension. Bax’s whole argument was designed to bolster his reading of Marx, whom he knew personally. Bax felt something lacking in Marx’s work – a spiritual or metaphysical dimension that was excessively purged away from his economic writings. If Bax had lived long enough, he would have seen something of this sort come to light in the posthumous publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. As things stood, he chose to fill the gap himself, hence the definition of the ‘alogical’.

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

81

Hulme is respectful of Bax as a renowned intellectual of the previous generation, and one who did clear room for the category of the non-rational. However, as Hulme pointed out, the gesture was partial, occurring in an otherwise conventional Idealist structure. Having identified the alogical, Bax retreated, unable to believe this category humanly apprehensible or controllable. The resulting, cautious reliance on Idealist systems was offensive to one familiar with James and Bergson, and Hulme’s deference gives way to mockery that must have been startling, as Bax’s reaction suggests, coming as it did from a much younger writer. What is most interesting is Hulme’s political subtext. As noted, Bax, an early British exegete of Marx, was by 1880 a leading figure in the Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s first socialist party, founded on Marxist principles.142 In the pre-war years, his worldview extended to a vociferous opposition to the women’s vote, which he expressed frequently in the New Age, eventually publishing a full-length polemic entitled The Fraud of Feminism (1913). Hulme proposes that Bax’s aversion to the non-rational reflected his deep-rooted objection to the suffrage movement. 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 philosophic process?143

Thus, Bergson’s intellect/intuition distinction is gendered male/female, and the suffrage movement has Hulme’s implied support – a strange alliance considering his later comments on democratic reform and feminine attributes. Indeed, at this time, Hulme’s ‘rhetorical affinities’ appear to lie with the suffragettes.144 This contrasts with the apparently misogynistic language of his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, only a few months before. It is important to note, as has Ronald Bush, that such critical deployment of gender as we see in the ‘Lecture’ is sometimes simply rhetorical – for example, recommendations of virility in literature occur in Wilde as much as Eliot or Hulme.145 But in this case Hulme is specifically alluding to the suffragette cause, and enjoying the unease it causes Bax. This does indicate that he sensed how philosophical ideas were gendered, and there is no doubt that as his classicism hardened through 1911, humorous references to the female élan would be replaced by his own panic at Bergsonism’s appeal to women – an ironic development considering these jokes at Bax’s expense. The metaphor of the ‘Promised Land’ was one used by Orage to describe the socialist project in New Age articles of 1908.146 For Hulme, the promised land is intuitive consciousness, the thing-in-itself; for Orage, it is socialism. However,

82

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

the two could easily be blurred as one within the pages of the New Age, where the thing-in-itself was a kind of utopia, something that would always elude human experience, but which provided the goal of all its earthly designs. As Carpenter implied long before, the utopian state in philosophy as much as society was the state of oneness, in which the conscious mind could appreciate unconsciousness; in which the subject and object are reunited. Orage was frustrated with the rationalism that cramped British socialism, not only in Fabian circles, but also among the first generation of Marxists who did much to present socialism as a science. Bax’s metaphysics went hand-in-hand with an overly rigid politics that had made the S.D.F. the most impotent of early socialist groups as well as the most radical. Orage, too, would have opposed Bax’s anti-feminism. He had been a militant supporter of the suffragettes and was arrested during a 1907 protest outside parliament. His willingness to publish Bax’s polemics was another case of his open-forum policy, for he had in the early numbers published Teresa Billington-Grieg among other prominent ‘New Women’.147 However, his support for the Woman’s Vote dwindled as he became disenchanted with parliamentary democracy. Similarly Beatrice Hastings, Orage’s lover and a prolific New Age contributor, demanded the vote while provocatively disdaining it under different pen-names.148 As her relationship with Orage broke down, a streak of misogyny entered his writing also.149 Hulme’s second piece picks a fight with another prominent intellectual, Bax’s contemporary and friend, Richard Burdon Haldane. Again, a philosopher in the Idealist tradition, Haldane was also a leading figure in the Liberal government. The links between his politics and his philosophical views were, again, a matter of public record. He exemplified the spirit of rationalism in Liberal policy. Haldane’s philosophic bent was well known. He had trained in Idealist philosophy in Edinburgh and Göttingen and produced several philosophical works from 1880s onwards. Towards the end of the century, he had, like Asquith, given up a successful legal career to enter politics, becoming one of the core group of New Liberals along with Asquith and Edward Grey.150 Haldane was remarkable for applying his Idealist principles directly to practical policy.151 He did so in his capacity as Minister for War in the tense period leading up to 1914. It was clear that Germany and Britain were in an arms race. Haldane, considering his knowledge of Germany an asset, visited the country to survey its armaments policy. His research informed British military reform up to the outbreak of war. As minister, Haldane treated the procedures of reform with the logic he had refined in his philosophy. This peculiar quality of abstract reasoning, and its German affiliations, made Haldane a target for

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

83

radicals before the war, and for xenophobes during it; he was forced out of office in 1914 following public accusations of Germanophilia. Orage was one of those who objected to Haldane’s army reforms. Diane Milburn has shown how a strain of Germanophobia developed in the New Age, particularly during the war years, and as we have seen, even Orage’s Nietzscheanism was inflected with occasional reservations regarding its cultural origins.152 However, Orage’s main point of attack on Haldane was his coldly rationalistic restructuring of the body of mostly working-class men that historically composed the British Army. This rehearsed, in miniature, Orage’s objection to New Liberal statism. Lee Garver has written illuminatingly on this subject.153 Hulme’s decision to devote his second ‘Searchers after Reality’ article to Haldane’s Gifford Lectures of 1902–1903 is revealing. Published under the title The Pathway to Reality (1903), the lectures advanced an elaborate theory of metaphysical progress towards the ‘absolute’ in a style similar to the neoHegelianism flourishing at Oxford. The New Liberalism is often associated with this revival of British Idealism, as represented by T. H. Green and Leonard Hobhouse in particular.154 Haldane was notable for working out his own system. The result was a deep-rooted optimism, a confidence in the inexorable flourishing of the world-spirit through liberal democratic reform. Hulme would later blame this confidence in abstract law when attacking Haldane’s fulsome support for the reform of the Lords. There is something of the chessboard about Haldane’s writing – in this case predicated on an Idealist, rather than a positivist system. Hulme’s piece on Haldane demonstrates how he, like James, saw positivism and idealism as two forms of the same hubristic fallacy: the belief that experience could be broken down and understood as an abstract equation of one sort or another. In his 1909 piece, Hulme focuses on Haldane’s aversion to metaphor in philosophical writing, and his strict adherence to technical terminology in the Idealist fashion. For Hulme, this offers a chance to contrast the abstract philosopher with the philosopher of the body and the senses, the écrivain sensorial, as Gourmont puts it.155 In this case, the implied contrast is with Bergson, but it could equally be with Nietzsche. Hulme here introduces a passage that refers specifically to his theory of poetry. Haldane’s abstract terminology is ridiculed for its fundamental assumption: that there was an intrinsic truth to his metaphysics, to what was in fact a fictive structure. Haldane has complete faith in conceptual thinking to penetrate to fundamental truths. What is most striking is the metaphor that Hulme chooses to use to capture this.

84

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism The universals of thought […] arrange […] 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 […] 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. This has proved an easy step for Mr. Haldane to take. The constant burden of his book is 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. One might caricature his position by saying that he believes in the ultimate reality of the police.156

Hulme’s brushes with the police come to mind: as noted in Chapter 1, he had tested the ‘ultimate reality’ of criminal law in person. But, primarily, I want to emphasize what is an early case of a recurring analogy in Hulme’s writing, by which he links the intuitive/conceptual divide in philosophy with forces in society; respectively, with the tangible force of the mob and the abstract force of government. The analogy was not Hulme’s; it occurs in a tradition of crowd psychology, notably in the work of Hippolyte Taine, as we shall in Chapter 3. The divide is gendered and conforms to divisions of high and low, classic and romantic, that resonate through modernist writing, including Hulme’s.157 Hulme’s metaphor was apt at a time when a revival in trade unionism had resulted in several major strikes and protests. As he wrote, such activity was nearing a pre-war peak, and added to industrial protests were those by suffragettes. The unruly unconscious, the mob and the feminine were associations that came easily to hand. What is notable in 1909 is Hulme’s implied appreciation of these forces as correlatives of Bergson’s élan vital, and, more importantly, with a poetic language that dealt in concrete images, rather than abstract ideas. The piece on Haldane is particularly notable for its restatement of Hulme’s theory of metaphor. Both pieces, on Bax and Haldane, clearly respond or allude to the political debates unfolding elsewhere in the journal. However, Hulme’s response is less reflective of an affinity with socialism than with Orage’s philosophical argument against rationalism in politics. Hulme’s articles revolve around the contrast between forms of rationalism, and what he called ‘the new philosophy’ – in other words, the vitalism of Bergson, and the pragmatism of James. The contrast was expressed, intriguingly, through an analogy with popular insurgency. It is true that this overlap calls to mind what Raymond Williams calls the ‘negative identification’ of the cultural avant-garde with the socialist cause, or, more specifically, with forms of spiritual deprivation experienced by the working class in a phase of capitalist expansion – a state of mind exemplified by Hulme’s

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

85

New Age colleague and fellow poet, F. S. Flint.158 Hulme and his editor are in agreement philosophically, if not explicitly politically. It may be overstating the case to say that Hulme was addressing a working class readership, but he shares Orage’s philosophic interests, and his playfulness with political analogies suggests a degree of interest with the left – a detached sense of unexplored associations. Moreover, aside from specific allegiances, he clearly shares the New Age’s, or rather Orage’s, feelings about the abstraction of the individual. The most revealing of Hulme’s 1909 pieces is perhaps the last, on the French philosopher Jules de Gaultier.159 Gaultier was writing very much under the influence of Nietzsche, and his most famous work, Le Bovarysme (1902), fits into the earlier discussion of how meaning is constructed from fictions.160 Gaultier presents Madame Bovary’s fantasies as a universal, and indeed necessary, human activity. This was very much in tune with Nietzsche and James. Agreeing enthusiastically, Hulme accepts the gulf that separates his own discourse from any ultimate truth. Mental activity is the struggle of an animal to make sense of its predicament, to be fit to survive. All one can do is fabricate systems of thinking to guide the organism through life. Philosophy is a fiction; all worldviews are aesthetic phenomena. Hulme thus disdains the task of pursuing ‘truth’, acknowledging that everything he might say is an expression of temperament, not of objective certainty. This position was out of kilter with the vast majority of progressive writing, which cleaved to the idea of the perfect society, achievable more or less quickly in the existing world. For Hulme, such an idea was a fantasy: the universe remained untouched by human activity, however frenetic. His position by late 1909 was clearly more in tune with a conservative stoicism. This essay, then, anticipates Hulme’s Tory philosophy well before his first citation of Maurras or Lasserre – a point to which we shall return in the next chapter. Moreover, this piece is also the most reminiscent, in many ways, of Orage’s thought. Orage had in fact developed a similar, conservative point of view, beginning on this course as early as 1894. To explain the roots of this conservatism, we have to retreat a little from these 1909 pieces to show how Orage’s writing anticipated the kind of Nietzschean perspectivism Hulme describes in his piece on Gaultier.

Orage’s tendency towards conservatism In the three years between the Grayson crisis of 1909 and the emergence of Guild Socialism in 1912, Orage backed away from such direct engagements

86

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

in political events, while increasingly publishing voices from beyond the progressive consensus, including members of a right-wing Nietzschean group led by Oscar Levy, editor of the English edition of Nietzsche’s works. At the same time, Orage’s resistance to the National Insurance Bill brought him into odd alliances with self-proclaimed opponents of socialism such as Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, as did his defence of the principle of aristocracy (although his use of that term was highly specific). His indifference to the Parliament Bill even led him at times to defend the House of Lords. In this period, too, his initial enthusiasm for the suffrage movement was replaced by an increasing scepticism about its cause and benefits. In his philosophical mode, he expanded on his theory of the intrinsic limitations of humanity, a theme which often resonated with similar writings by his conservative contributors. The paradox of how Orage came to subscribe to a belief that ‘Man is a fixed species’ in advance of Hulme can be explained by reference to his theory of consciousness. In his account of spiritual evolution, animal, human and ‘superman’ consciousness are stages divided by ‘species’ barriers. The passage from lower to higher stages involves sloughing off earlier, limited forms of cognition. Orage describes each of these stages as ‘fixed’ because the states of being they represent are left behind by the evolving larger power. It is a mistake to assume that human reason is capable of seeing this larger curve of development or indeed surviving the passage of life beyond itself. Thus, we are fixed within limits of both understanding and becoming; the life force driving our endeavours will surpass us and our cognitive capacity. What can human consciousness do in the meantime? It can merely strive to push against the upper limits of what it can know, or be, with no guarantee of a result. We can try to acknowledge that our minds are feeble excrescences of the life force – that we are ‘conscious automata’ to borrow Huxley’s phrase, confusing our mental cerebration for an essential function, when it is in fact a mere tool of the organism.161 Orage thus merged elements of Nietzsche, evolutionary psychology, Marx and Eastern religions. His books on Nietzsche repeat the idea, from the Twilight of the Idols and other texts, that we project patterns onto the world, recalling Hulme’s ‘cinder-heap’ motif, while his paraphrase of the change from the human to Übermensch, enigmatically described in Thus Spake Zarathustra, recalls the uncertainty surrounding speciation in Darwin’s theory. There is also a conspicuous parallel with socialist theory: Orage sees the parallels between speciation and Marx’s proposal that we cannot anticipate or imagine the future state of universal freedom but must at the same time do our utmost to get there.162 The problem is how little influence we have in achieving a goal that will, in any

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

87

case, arrive inexorably, but at its own pace. Our intentionality is superfluous, yet the will to become fully human, to reach the upper limit of becoming within the ambit of our condition, is encouraged by Nietzsche and Marx – and, indeed, by the promoters of Eastern meditation. This paradox explains how Orage can propose radical social reform while maintaining an essentially pessimistic belief in the limits of human nature. His politics combine a belief in ‘entelechy’ – the inexorable evolution of life form towards the upper limits of its type – and a sense of ‘epiphenomenalism’, that is to say, humanity’s lack of real understanding or control over its own limited position in this incomprehensible spiritual evolution.163 Founded on this, he sees all conscious human endeavour, including both spiritual and political aspiration, as requiring the use of fictions, and human self-advancement as an inconclusive but worthy cause, justifiably fuelled by myths, which galvanize and ennoble the race, despite its lack of real agency. According to this logic, ‘you become what you have led yourself to be’.164

‘Towards Socialism’ (1907–1908) Orage’s first signed manifesto at the New Age came in the form of a 1908 series of articles entitled ‘Towards Socialism’. They begin by contrasting Eastern and Western worldviews. As noted above, Orage had long sought the union of these categories. It is surprising, then, to find him arguing, as a socialist, that Eastern (Hindu) and Western (Christian) beliefs correlate respectively with Conservative and Socialist ideology. However, as this assertion is developed as a larger argument, it becomes clear that he is identifying two philosophical principles – and that, rather than insisting on their inevitable conflict, he seeks to merge them.165 Orage proposes that the Eastern worldview is represented by the Vedantic parable that compares human nature to a dog’s curly tail that can never be straightened.166 It is resigned to the view that ‘life is an irremediable ill; all progress is illusion; the world is a prison, and men are chained to the wheel of becoming’.167 The occurrence of this worldview is not geographically limited, Orage argues. In the West, it is seen in the Conservative belief that human nature is intrinsically imperfect, and society can only be maintained, not perfected. This ancient wisdom was most recently manifested, according to Orage, in the premiership of Lord Salisbury.168 In contrast, he argues, the ‘greatest service of Christianity to the West […] is the doctrine of salvation’. In modern times, the salvation narrative has a

88

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

new basis in socialism, which, while sharing Christianity’s linear narrative of redemption, differed significantly from its underlying dogma: ‘we need not pursue the doctrine of Salvation, since it is certain that Socialists, at any rate, are temperamentally disposed to believe that the world and man can be indefinitely changed’.169 Here is the synthesis of the two worldviews: he locates the socialist version of salvation in the immanent world, in the human state of becoming, dispensing with the Christian higher realm of eternity. This chimes of course with Orage’s ‘immanent spiritualism’ discussed above. Orage is borrowing here from Swami Vivekananda, the famous popularizer of the Vedantic tradition in America and Europe, who first introduced the story of the dog’s tail to the West.170 His point was made to counter Western ‘fanaticism’: the belief the world could be changed. But Vivekananda was not opposed to socialism itself. Rather, he argued in its favour. His point was that while the world could not be changed, the effort to change it was good for the human soul. It operated as a sort of ‘moral gymnasium’.171 Here, we begin to see the logic behind Orage’s Nietzschean socialism. While accepting the unchanging state of becoming, the circular nature of history, he also saw the possibility of human self-improvement through the commitment to change. Nietzsche had provided new models of immanent ‘salvation’, in the idea of ‘ascendancy’, of self-overcoming, in the Übermensch. These concepts had been left undefined, perhaps deliberately, as a means to avoid nihilism, to provide some kind of placeholder for an absent God, a goal to move humanity onwards from a state of aimless becoming, prone to existential despair. For Orage, the socialist myth of salvation is an ‘enduring illusion’: a vision to work towards, to provide momentum, regardless of whether it could ever be achieved. Consequently, the bold contrast between conservatism–socialism, East–West and cyclical–linear history is not an either-or distinction. Orage contrives, as did so many of his predecessors, to unite East and West, in this case, by uniting the belief in a state of becoming and a state of being, the Eastern circle and the Western ladder to perfection. This explains his hybrid figure of speech for socialist aspirations: ‘a continual mounting up the ladder of becoming’.172 As noted above, Orage, like Carpenter and the theosophists, hoped to unite Eastern and Western thought. He describes this as a unification of conservatism and socialism, a simultaneous belief in the timeless, circular action of the worldwill, indifferent to human intervention, and in the need for principled human action towards a definite goal. The Western myth of a ladder is thus reconciled with the Eastern circle. Beneath Orage’s utopianism lies a profounder sense of human limitation. His socialism is predicated on a kind of conservatism.

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

89

Without a whimsically postulated aim, involving seriousness, it is impossible that one’s diversions should really divert. The game of life must not only be played but if it is to be played it must be played seriously; and to be played seriously it must be played for high stakes, even though the receipt or forfeiture are purely imaginary.173

This is not to deny, however, that Orage was committed as a socialist to the abolition of poverty and to economic and social reconstruction. The drive towards utopia was not merely a dramatic pose; he seriously believed that socialism could bring about change for the better in people’s lives. Orage uses another metaphor, perhaps thinking of Ernest Shackleton’s recently reported activities: just because one is striving to reach the North Pole does not mean one ever expects to get there.174 It is merely a goal to move towards, to ensure that culture remains moving in what Nietzsche calls an ‘ascendant’ direction. Ascendency is not transcendence: there is no supernatural telos. Orage affirms the circularity of reasoning, of the futility and necessity, of human endeavour. Socialist reform, in the short term, was the manifestation of that endeavour, and its result would be ascendancy, amelioration – but never perfection or resolution. Nietzsche distinguishes between those that beckon men onwards and those that beckon him upwards. All ideals that are merely as it were the future tenses of existing things are ideals beckoning onwards; but ideals which are abstract, contrary to nature, impossible of realisation and despotic, are false.175

A distinction is made between ascendent and transcendent: we must aim for the completion of our potential, not a surpassing of it. What springs to mind from these articles is that they anticipate Georges Sorel, whom Hulme would later translate. One can see quite clearly why Keir Hardie would warn against the New Age’s ‘disciples of Nietzsche – the neurotic apostle of modern Anarchism’.176 Orage’s rhetoric, his call for revolution and his depiction of a never-ending human progress towards the stars were written on the basis of this existentialism. He was literally a troublemaker, who felt that ‘as a joyous spectator-actor he should enter into the strife, consciously aiding the unfolding of the eternal drama, of which himself was both Dionysos and Apollo’.177 So we see that Orage was committed to an overarching spiritualism, within which he criticised human rationality as a mere fleeting phase, a delusional egoism. In this transitional stage, the reasoning subject, unable to accept its own insignificance, creates fictions, maps and historiographical plans, to explain the cosmos in anthropomorphic terms. It places itself at the centre of the universe. Having presented this state of inevitable human delusion, Orage is faced

90

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

with the consequent question of how to verify his own indictment of human delusion. At this point, he adopts a form of pragmatism. He says that, as we cannot verify anything, it is necessary to take on trust the belief that appeals to us most persistently. We do so in the knowledge that it cannot be verified. In other words, Orage adopts the logic of Pascal’s Wager, or, within his own time, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, William James’s ‘will to believe’, Gaultier’s ‘bovarysme’ or Vaihinger’s ‘philosophy of as-if ’. In political terms, this results in a socialism that is genuinely committed to its purpose of immanent salvation, while ironically detached from it. It seeks genuine ameliorative social change but at the same time treats this cause as a philosophical placeholder, along with its larger myth of ultimate spiritual elevation. These goals are always deferred, always vexed and always far off, both a promised land and an epiphanic vision. The priority for Orage is to maximize the opportunity available to the largest possible number of people to achieve the maximum self-consciousness. This was the spiritual notion implicit to Orage’s thinking as he began to develop Guild Socialism with Hobson in 1912.178 At this point, we can therefore distinguish Orage’s pragmatism from his mystic beliefs. The latter are no doubt important to Orage, and they came to the fore again in his interest in Gurdjieff from around 1919. But what is most interesting about him in 1911–1912 is that he shared Hulme’s pragmatism. This is the key to understanding why in 1911–1912, as Orage embarked on promoting Guild Socialism, he also joined with Hulme in advocating a view of man as a fixed species, subject to Original Sin.

Notes 1 The journal, launched as The Freewoman in 1911, was relaunched twice – first as the New Freewoman, in 1912; and again in January 1914, as The Egoist. For histories of the journal, see Les Garner, A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden, 1882–1960 (Aldershot: Avebury/Gower, 1990), pp. 51–154; Clarke, Dora Marsden, and Lucy Delap, ‘The Freewoman, Periodical Communities and the Feminist Reading Public’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 61.2 (Winter 2000), 233–76. 2 Ardis makes the case that the New Age was opposed on principle to ‘the modernist avant-garde’. See Modernism and Cultural Conflict, pp. 143–72. Rebecca Beasley provides a nuanced account of the changing affiliations of Imagism over the period of 1913–1914 in Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 89–97.

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

91

3 Levenson, Genealogy, pp. 63–79. Clarke, Dora Marsden, pp. 137–47; and Andrew Thacker, ‘Dora Marsden and The Egoist: “Our War Is With Words” ’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 36.2 (1993), 179–96, for the case for links between Imagism and the Egoist. 4 Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, pp. 143–72; Beasley, Ezra Pound and Visual Culture, pp. 89–97. 5 For Pound’s debt to Ruskin, see Leon Surette, ‘Ezra Pound and British Radicalism’, English Studies in Canada, 9.4 (December 1983), 435–51; Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 18, 21, 50, 151; and Michael Coyle, ‘A Profounder Didacticism: Ruskin, Orage and Pound’s Perception of Social Credit’, Paideuma, 17.1 (1988), 7–28. For Pound’s Neoplatonism, see Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). 6 See Levenson on modernist individualism in Genealogy, pp. 37–47, 63–79. See Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, pp. 143–73, for a distinction between modernism and socialism. 7 A. R. Orage, ‘An Editor’s Progress: I. The New Age’, The Commonweal, 3 (10 February 1926), 376–79 (376); repr. as ‘An Editor’s Progress: Part I. – The New Age I’, in New Age, 38.20 (18 March 1926), 235–36 (235). 8 ‘The Future of the New Age’, NA, 1.1 (2 May 1907), 8. 9 For broader studies of how the Edwardian occult impacted on a range of cultural forms, see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The latter briefly considers Hulme’s and Bergson’s relations to the phenomenon of British occultism in the context of the New Age (pp. 135–36, 139–40, 221). 10 Orage explicitly rejected Bergson in 1914, NA, 15.1 (7 May 1914), 12, but it is important to recall that Hulme had distanced himself from the philosopher, for similar reasons more than two years earlier in ‘Bergson Lecturing’ (2 November 1911, 15–16; CW, pp. 154–59) and ‘Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’ (9 November 1911, pp. 38–40; CW, pp. 160–65). These articles are discussed in the following chapter. 11 Levenson, Genealogy, p. 79; Clarke, Dora Marsden, pp. 4–5. 12 Ardis takes this phrase from Orage’s most hostile commentary on Pound (R.H.C. [A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 14.2 (13 November 1913), 50–52) and applies it by extension to the ‘modernist avant-garde’. Modernism and Cultural Conflict, p. 157. See also ‘The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age’, pp. 407–34. 13 Wallace Martin, ‘A Conservative Philosophy’, The ‘New Age’ Under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), pp. 212–35.

92

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

14 A. R. Orage, ‘Unedited Opinions: The End of Man’, NA, 9.4 (25 May 1911), 84; ‘Unedited Opinions: East and West’, NA, 9.7 (15 June 1911), 154; ‘Unedited Opinions: Contempt for Man’, NA, 9.9 (29 June 1911), 203; ‘Unedited Opinions: The Government of the Mind’, NA, 9.13 (27 July 1911), 299; ‘Unedited Opinions: Down with the Tricolour’, NA, 9.21 (21 September 1911), 489–90. 15 For example, Charles Ferrall, ‘The New Age and the Emergence of Reactionary Modernism before the Great War’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38.3 (1992), 653–70; Anne Fernihough, ‘Go in Fear of Abstractions’, pp. 479–97; Lee Garver, ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’, pp. 133–47, and ‘Lost Politics’, pp. 103–30. 16 Owen, Place of Enchantment, pp. 135–36, 139–40, 221. 17 Oppenheim, The Other World, p. 183; and Owen, Place of Enchantment, pp. 132–34; Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to AntiSemitism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 47–62; Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), pp. 34, 168–70, 220–30; Demetres Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos” (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), pp. 78–82. 18 On Upward, see also Paul Skinner, ‘Of Owls and Waterspouts’, Paideuma, 17 (Spring 1988), 9–68; Donald Davie, Pound (London: Fontana, 1975), pp. 62–74 and ‘The Mysterious Allen Upward’, The American Scholar, 59.1 (1990), 53–65; Suzanne Hobson, ‘The Angel Club: Allen Upward and the Divine Calling of Modernist Literature’, Literature and Theology, 22.1 (2008), 48–63. 19 Owen, Place of Enchantment, pp. 249, 250. 20 Ibid., pp. 117, 132–33, 135, 139, 141–42, 146, 221, 247, 252. Owen argues that ‘if Nietzsche was claimed by occultists as a fellow traveller, it was Henri Bergson who came closest to articulating an “occult” philosophy’, stressing Bergson’s personal connections to spiritualist circles via his sister, Moina, who married MacGregor Mathers, leader of the Order of the Golden Dawn. She also notes, however, that Bergson never expressed an interest in ‘magic’ and, according to Yeats, was unimpressed by Mathers (p. 135). 21 See Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity, and Peter Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001) for details of Catholic and Anglican modernism, respectively. 22 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890-1930 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959), puts Durkheim’s study of religion in context, pp. 283–85; John Burrow, Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 77–92; and Frank Turner, Between Science and Religion: Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 1–37.

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

93

23 Burrow, Crisis of Reason, p. 57. 24 Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, pp. 29, 54, 278. 25 Rae, Practical Muse, pp. 39, n. 63, 240n. Rae cites Judith Ryan’s discussion of ‘daylight mysticism’ in The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), p. 219, and her definition of the term as ‘a representation of mystical experience that “divest[s] mystical experience of its mystery” ’ (p. 223). 26 Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 43. 27 For example, Hulme wrote respectfully of Florence Farr in a note to Flint of 1909, quoted in Carr, Verse Revolutionaries, p. 178; and he was close to Pound, particularly from late 1911 to 1915. Both Pound and Farr were members of Hulme’s 1909 Secession Group, both were close to Yeats, and both retained an interest in mystical or spiritualist thinking. For details of Farr’s career, see Josephine Johnson, Florence Farr: Bernard Shaw’s New Woman (London: Colin Smythe, 1975). 28 Ezra Pound, ‘Psychology and Troubadours’, The Quest, 4.1 (October 1912), 37–53. 29 Levenson’s account of Upward, for example, omits any reference to his mystical beliefs and focuses on his hostility to abstract humanism. Genealogy, pp. 71–74, 78, 132. 30 This is a recurring complaint about Bergsonism in his pieces of 1911–1912, for example, ‘Bax on Bergson’, NA, 9.14 (3 August 1911), 328–31 (329); CW, pp. 116–24 (pp. 119–20); ‘Notes on Bergson II’, p. 610; CW, pp. 128–30; Thomas Gratton [T. E. Hulme], ‘Bergson Lecturing’, NA, 10.1 (2 November 1911), 15–16 (15); CW, pp. 154–59 (pp. 154–55). 31 Hulme, Lewis and Pound shared a platform at the Quest Society meeting at the Kensington Town Hall on 22 January 1914; Hulme and Lewis spoke on modern art, while Pound read poems by himself and by Hulme. See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, pp. 163, 177. For a survey of previous work on modernist involvement with the Quest Society, and an account of Orage’s friendship with Mead and both men’s interactions with Pound, see Tryphonopoulos, Celestial Tradition, pp. xii–xiv, 78–82. See also Surette, Birth of Modernism, pp. 232–42. 32 Rae, Practical Muse, pp. 39, 80–83, 84–85. 33 His work under the influence of Gurdjieff from 1919 is not my concern here. See Paul Beekman, Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (York Beach: Weiser Books, 2001). Interestingly, Jacob Epstein argues that Orage fell under Gurdjieff ’s sway in the wake of Hulme’s death, the former supplanting the latter as his leading influence. See Jacob Epstein: An Autobiography (London: Michael Joseph, 1940), pp. 61–62. 34 Wallace Martin, ‘Introduction’, in Orage as Critic, ed. by Wallace Martin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 1–28 (p. 13). 35 Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1911; published in English as The Philosophy of As-If, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and co., 1924)) was published in 1911, but written more than thirty years

94

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

earlier. It anticipates the pragmatic movement of Peirce, James and Dewey. Orage was one of the first British critics to discuss this work. See R.H.C. [A. R. Orage] in ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 15.6 (11 June 1914), 133–34 (133). Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) cites Vaihinger in his account of ‘literary fictions’ as ‘the consciously false’ (p. 40, see also pp. 37, 39, 41). His work is noted in modern academic guides to pragmatism; see ‘F. C. S. Schiller and European Pragmatism’, in A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 52. Orage praises Babbitt in the first of his ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 13 (8 May 1913), 37–38. Later columns discussed Sorel (NA, 18.23 (6 April 1916), 541) and Croce (NA, 14.6 (11 December 1913), 176–77). Future references to Orage’s longrunning column ‘Readers and Writers’ (1913–1922) omit the authorial detail but retain specific publication details, for ease of reference. 36 William James, The Will to Believe (London: Longmans, Green, 1897), p. xiii. A. R. Orage, ‘The New Romanticism’, Theosophical Review, 40 (March 1907), 50–56. 37 For details of Orage’s background and early career, see Philip Mairet, A. R. Orage: A Memoir (London: J.M. Dent, 1936), pp. 1–29; Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 1893–1923 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), pp. 25–44; and John Carswell, Lives and Letters: A. R. Orage, Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky, 1906–1957 (New York: New Directions, 1978), pp. 15–20. 38 See Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 38–41, 43–45. The first phrase is from Walt Whitman, ‘One-Self I Sing’ (1867), Leaves of Grass (1855; rev. edn, Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891– 1892), p. 9; the second phrase is from ‘Song of Myself ’ (1855, revised many times), Leaves of Grass, pp. 29–79 (p. 78). 39 Quoted in Steele, Alfred Orage, p. 35. 40 A. R. Orage, ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 8 (4 January 1896), 2. 41 A. R. Orage,‘Towards Democracy’, Labour Leader, 8 (4 January 1896), 2. 42 Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, pp. 156–57, 158–68. 43 A. R. Orage, ‘Towards Democracy’, p. 2. 44 Mark Bevir, ‘British Socialism and American Romanticism’, English Historical Review, 110 (September 1995), 878–901. See Jonathan Mendilow, The Romantic Tradition in British Socialism (London & Sydney: Croom & Helm, 1986); and Stanley Pierson, Marxism and British Socialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 3–38, for accounts of the romantic tradition behind early British socialism. 45 Quoted by Bevir in ‘British Socialism and American Romanticism’, p. 880; John Ruskin, Works, ed. by E. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), V: Modern Painters III (1904), p. 384. Orage read Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin as a youth. Mairet, A. R. Orage, p. 5. 46 Bevir, ‘British Socialism and American Romanticism’, pp. 879, 900.

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

95

47 Ibid., p. 879. See René Wellek, ‘Emerson and German Philosophy’, New England Quarterly, 16 (1943), 41–62. 48 Bevir’s description in ‘British Socialism and American Romanticism’, p. 879. 49 Stanley Pierson provides one account of this response in British Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 192–200. 50 A. R. Orage, ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 8 (2 May 1896), 156. 51 A. R. Orage, ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 8 (11 April 1896), 122. 52 A. R. Orage, ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 7 (16 November 1895), 5. 53 A. R. Orage, ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 9 (13 February 1897), 50. 54 R. M. [A. R. Orage], ‘The Book of the Week: Review of “Iolaus, An Anthology of Friendship”, ed. by Edward Carpenter’, NA, 1.4 (23 May 1907), 55. I am grateful to John Wood for providing evidence of Orage’s use of ‘R.M.’ as a pseudonym. 55 Orage, ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 9 (15 May 1897), 162. 56 George Bernard Shaw, ‘The Illusions of Socialism’, in Forecasts of the Coming Century by a Decade of Writers, ed. by Edward Carpenter (Manchester: Labour Press, 1897), pp. 141–73. 57 Gareth Griffith, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 52. 58 M. H. Abrams deals with some of these roots in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). 59 Published in Edward Carpenter, Civilization, Its Cause and Cure. And Other Essays (London: Swan Sonnenscheim 1889), pp. 1–50. For an account of its reception, see Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, p. 143. 60 Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Sandra M. den Otter, British Idealism, and Social Explanation. 61 The term ‘monistic idealism’ might serve to differentiate the Vedantic tradition from the ‘absolute idealism’ of Hegel. The difference lies in how much one credits the reasoning mind as an instrument or a force in spiritual evolution. Orage’s rejection of rationalism becomes clearer below. 62 Carpenter, Civilization, p. 24. 63 Ibid., p. 25. 64 Orage, ‘Unedited Opinions: The End of Man’, p. 84. 65 This text is a similar synthesis of western thought and eastern spirituality, revolving around the concept of the Sat-Chit-Ananda. The first step that the Absolute takes out of itself towards creation is Existence (Sat), ConsciousnessForce (Chit) and Delight (Ananda). ‘Supermind’ or ‘Truth Consciousness’ is a fourth stage. The Life Divine first appeared serially in Aurobindo’s journal Arya: A Philosophical Review in fifty-two chapters between August 1914 to January 1919.

96

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

66 Carpenter refers to involution in his book From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta, pp. 191, 313. Orage refers to ‘involution’ in his discussion of Carpenter in ‘Past and Present’, p. 2. 67 A. R. Orage, ‘Unedited Opinions: The Use and Misuse of Egoism’, NA, 15.13 (30 July 1914), 300. He attacks the egoism of John Davidson’s Nietzschean writing in similar terms in ‘Book of the Week: John Davidson, His Mark’, NA, 3.7 (13 June 1908), 133. 68 Edward Carpenter, ‘Consciousness Without Thought’, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), pp. 153–63 (pp. 154–55). 69 Ibid., p. 156. 70 Ibid., p. 159. 71 Orage’s review of From Adam’s Peak in ‘A Bookish Causerie’, Labour Leader, 8 (21 March 1896), 102. Carpenter discusses sut-chit-ánandra Brahm in From Adam’s Peak, pp. 156–57. 72 Orage’s review of From Adam’s Peak in ‘A Bookish Causerie’, Labour Leader, 8 (21 March 1896), 157. 73 Carpenter, From Adam’s Peak, p. 159. 74 For more on the Leeds Art Club and Jackson, who introduced Orage to Nietzsche, see Mairet, A. R. Orage, pp. 20–29, 21–27; and Steele, Alfred Orage, pp. 45–87. Steele records in detail the club’s vital role in the British modernist movement, first under the leadership of Orage and Jackson (pp. 1–174), and later of Herbert Read and Michael Sadler (pp. 177–268). 75 Michael Ruse provides earlier citations for this phrase in The Darwinian Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. x. 76 Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (London: John Murray, 1871), p. 147. 77 ‘In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.’ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 488. 78 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 147. 79 See Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936); and Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 457–9. 80 Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, p. 403. 81 ‘A Notebook II’, p. 138; CW, p. 425. 82 A. R. Orage, Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superman (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1907), p. 22. 83 Ibid., p. 25.

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

97

84 ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, CW, p. 62. 85 Orage, Consciousness, p. 34. 86 Ibid, pp. 26, 35. 87 David Thatcher, Nietzsche in England 1890-1914: The Growth of a Reputation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 220; Orage, Consciousness, p. 75. 88 See S. E. D. Shortt, Victorian Lunacy: Richard M. Bucke and the Practice of Late Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) for a detailed history of Bucke’s career and writings. J. R. Home, ‘R. M. Bucke: Pioneer Psychiatrist, Practical Mystic’, Ontario History, 59 (1967), 197–208. 89 For Bucke’s friendship with Whitman and Carpenter, see Shortt, Victorian Lunacy. See also S. E. D. Shortt, ‘The Myth of a Canadian Boswell: Dr. R. M. Bucke and Walt Whitman’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 1.2 (1984), 55–70. 90 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902, London: Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), pp. 398–99. 91 Richard Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1901), p. 19. 92 Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, pp. 20–21. 93 Ibid., pp. 61–82, esp. pp. 75–78. 94 Orage, Consciousness, p. 35. 95 L’Évolution créatrice, pp. iv–vi, 146–202; Creative Evolution, pp. xii–xiii, 135–85. Bergson gave a lecture course on Plotinus’s fourth Ennead at the Collège de France, 1897–1898 and refers to him in L’Évolution créatrice, p. 229; Creative Evolution, pp. 222. See Emile Brehier, ‘Images plotiniennes, Images bergsoniennes’, in Les Etudes bergsoniennes, 11 vols (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947–1974), II (1949), pp. 107–28 (p. 107); Rose Marie Mossé-Bastide, Bergson et Plotin (Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 1959), pp. 1–2; and Curtis L. Hancock, ‘The Influence of Plotinus on Bergson’s Critique of Empirical Science’, in Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, Part One, ed. by R. Baine Haines (Albany: State University of New York, 2001), pp. 139–61 (p. 139). 96 Ribot, EIC, pp. 163–84, 185–97; ECI, pp. 195–220, 221–35. Bergson, ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’, p. 7; Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 16. ‘Intuition Philosophique’, pp. 137–38; ‘Philosophical Intuition’, p. 128. 97 Marion Hamilton Carter, ‘Romanes’ Idea of Mental Development’, American Journal of Psychology, 11 (1899), 101–18 (102). 98 For Romanes’s impact on evolutionary psychology, see Robert Boakes, From Darwin to Behaviourism: Psychology and the Minds of Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 23–32. 99 Orage’s review of From Adam’s Peak in ‘A Bookish Causerie’, p. 157. 100 Orage, Consciousness, p. 45. 101 Ibid., p. 48.

98

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

102 Orage does not mention Bergson in his published work until 1914, when he wrote a critical account in the New Age (‘Unedited Opinions: The Popularity of Bergson’, NA, 15.9 (7 May 1914), 12). Hulme had expressed his own doubts in 1911, first pseudonymously (as ‘Thomas Grattan’) in ‘Bergson Lecturing’, pp. 15–16; CW, pp. 154–59, and then under his own name, in ‘Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’, NA, 10.2. (9 November 1911), 38–40; CW, pp. 160–65. 103 Orage, Consciousness, p. 45. 104 Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 27. 105 Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, pp. 293–94, 295. Edward Carpenter, The Drama of Life and Death (London: George Allen, 1912), pp. 126, 212, 221, 268. 106 See Orage, ‘Unedited Opinions’, NA, 15.1 (7 May 1914), 12. 107 For details of this period, see Mairet, A. R. Orage, pp. 30–49; Carswell, Lives and Letters, pp. 28–38. 108 A. R. Orage, Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age (London: T.N. Foulis, 1906); Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism (London: T.N. Foulis, 1907); Consciousness. 109 See Steele, Alfred Orage, pp. 65–135, for details of Orage’s Leeds Art Club lectures, and plates 11 & 12 for examples of the club’s lecture schedules, from Spring 1905. A. R. Orage, ‘Politics for Craftsmen’, Contemporary Review, 91 (June 1907), 787–88. 110 For accounts of Orage’s thinking in the context of ‘ethical socialism’ from the early days of Labour through to the Guild Socialist ‘retreat from politics’, see Pierson, British Socialists, pp. 192–249, 305. Pierson also briefly attempts to relate Orage’s 1906–1907 books to his socialism (pp. 194–96). 111 Arthur Penty, The Restoration of the Guild System (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906), p. viii. 112 Willard Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian Socialist Doctrines, 1881–89 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 251–99; Freeden, The New Liberalism, pp. 25–75. 113 See Stephen Yeo, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain’, History Workshop, 5 (1978), 214–17. See also Pierson. Marxism and British Socialism, pp. 226–45; and British Socialists, pp. 126–31. 114 Steele, Alfred Orage, pp. 1–22, esp. pp. 9–12. 115 Ibid., p. 133. 116 See Tom Gibbons, ‘Modernism and Reactionary Politics’, pp. 1140–57. 117 A. R. Orage, ‘Towards Socialism VIII: The Fallacy of Aristocracy’, NA, 2.4 (21 November 1907), 70. ‘Unedited Opinions III: A New Aristocracy’, NA, 8.6 (8 December 1910), 132. 118 Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: The Hogarth Press, 1940), pp. 122–29, 170–81. 119 Gibbons, ‘Modernism and Reactionary Politics’, pp. 1140–57. Orage, Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age, pp. 69–70, quoted by Dan Stone in Breeding Men (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p. 75.

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

99

120 A. R. Orage, ‘Nietzsche the Lyrical Bismarck’ [Review of J. M. Kennedy’s Quintessence of Nietzsche], NA, 6.13 (27 January 1910), 304. 121 Diane Milburn, The ‘Deutschlandbild’ of A. R. Orage and the ‘New Age’ Circle (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 57, 143–46. 122 Orage, ‘Nietzsche the Lyrical Bismarck’, pp. 304–05, 305. 123 Criticizing notions of aristocracy from Plato to Carlyle, in 1907, Orage concludes, with a dash of devil’s advocacy, ‘Hence not only a hereditary aristocracy is ridiculous, inhuman, and in the long run impossible, but an aristocracy of intellect, character, or what not, as well’ ‘Towards Socialism VIII: Fallacy of Aristocracy’, NA, 2.4 (21 November 1907), 70. Two pieces of 1910 are more frank, criticizing the cruder reading of Nietzsche as a political philosopher. A. R. Orage, ‘Unedited Opinions II: The Superman’, NA, 8.5 (1 December 1910), 107, insists that the superman ‘is selfbegotten’. Nietzsche’s idea of aristocracy is ‘vulgar, reactionary, and puerile’, ‘Unedited Opinions III: A New Aristocracy’, NA, 8.6 (8 December 1910), 132. 124 The ‘pluralist’ tradition in Britain is traceable through the liberalism of Lord Acton and F. W. Maitland to the Christian Socialism of John Neville Figgis, who had contacts with the New Age milieu. Orage and his Guild Socialist colleagues Penty, Hobson, Cole, Reckitt and Maeztu are commonly listed as the inheritors of this tradition. For a discussion of late Victorian and Edwardian pluralism in politics, see Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State, 1909-1926: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–1926 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 125 ‘First Public Conference on Mr. Wells’s Samurai’, NA, 1.1 (2 May 1907), 9–11. Wells’s satirical remarks contained a real threat: his vote of no confidence in the Webbs in late 1906 was only thwarted by Shaw’s rhetorical intervention. The latter saw the Fabian Arts Society and the New Age as a controlled forum for such dissidents in future. See Norman and Jean MacKenzie, The First Fabians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), pp. 322–52. 126 Arthur Penty, ‘The Restoration of Beauty to Life’, NA, 1.1 (2 May 1907), 5. This series, which ran for several weeks, expanded on Penty’s argument in The Restoration of the Gild System. 127 Orage publicly objected at a meeting of the Fabian Society in January 1908. Guild Socialism’s first historian considers this a turning point in the New Age’s estrangement from Fabianism. Niles Carpenter, Guild Socialism: An Historical and Critical Analysis (New York: Appleton, 1922), p. 45. 128 Mairet, A. R. Orage, pp. 53–55. 129 In response to a recriminating letter from a Labour M.P., Orage published ‘Plus Changer … A Reply to Mr. Clynes’, NA, 4.6 (3 December 1908), 106–07, providing a record of the journal’s gradual and ‘logical’ disillusionment with the Labour Party since 1907 and emphasizing its radical commitment: ‘THE NEW AGE belongs to the revolutionaries’ (107).

100

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

130 Steele, Alfred Orage, p. 137. 131 Keir Hardie, My Confession of Faith in the Labour Alliance (London: I.L.P. Publications, 1909), p. 13; quoted in S. G. Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left: Memoirs of a Modern Revolutionist (London: Edward Arnold, 1938), p. 117. 132 For accounts of these events, see Mairet, A. R. Orage, pp. 54–55; and Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left, pp. 109–22, 138–49; on Guild Socialism, pp. 147–49, 171–94; Carswell, Lives and Letters, pp. 43–45. 133 Grayson’s erratic career culminated with his role in the Maundy Gregory honours scandal of the 1920s, and his sudden disappearance thereafter. See David Clark, Victor Grayson: Labour’s Lost Leader (London: Quartet, 1985). 134 Mairet identifies this as a transitional period of political activism, after which ‘Orage would not allow [the New Age] to become the “kept” organ of any movement’. p. 57. 135 Lee Garver, ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’, pp. 134, 141, 140. See also Lee Garver, ‘Lost Politics’, pp. 103–30. 136 Michael Freeden, ‘Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology’, pp. 140–64; Ideologies and Political Theory; Ideology. 137 Marc Stears, ‘Guild Socialism and Ideological Diversity on the British Left’, pp. 289–306. 138 Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen-Nineties (London: Grant Richards, 1913), p. 23. 139 An influential example was Édouard Le Roy’s, La philosophie nouvelle: Henri Bergson (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1912). 140 ‘Notes on Bergson I’, pp. 587–88; CW, pp. 126–27. 141 R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988), p. 30. 142 For more on Bax, see Stanley Pierson, ‘Ernest Belfort Bax: 1854-1926: The Encounter of Marxism and Late Victorian Culture’, Journal of British Studies, 12.11 (1972), 39–60, and Mark Bevir, ‘Ernest Belfort Bax: Marxist, Positivist, and Idealist’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), 119–35. 143 T. E. Hulme, ‘Searchers After Reality I: Bax’, NA, 5.13 (29 July 1909), pp. 265–66 (p. 266); CW, pp. 89–92 (p. 92). 144 Garver, ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’, p. 140. 145 Ronald Bush, ‘Modernism and Gender Politics’ delivered to the London Modernism Seminar (6 November 2004), np. 146 For example, an important early editorial on the state of socialism under Fabian leadership was entitled, ‘ “To Your Tents, O Israel” ’ in NA, 1.24 (10 October 1907), 376. 147 Teresa Billington-Grieg appeared early on, as well as Florence Farr, T. E. Hulme’s colleague at the Secession Club, and one of the most famous ‘New Women’. See Johnson, Florence Farr, pp. 94–98, 141, 144, 147–51, 168.

Orage and Hulme – From Vitalism to a Conservative Ethic

101

148 See Ann Ardis, ‘Debating Feminism, Modernism, Socialism: Beatrice Hastings’s Voices in The New Age’, in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), pp. 160–67. 149 This becomes apparent in his series of dialogues, signed R. H. Congreve and entitled ‘Tales for Men Only’, beginning NA, 9.15 (10 August 1911), 349–50, and ending NA, 18.26 (27 April 1916), 614–15. 150 H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Haldane, Richard Burdon, Viscount Haldane (1856–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, January 2011, http://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2167/view/article/33643, accessed 27 January 2015. 151 For a recent account, see Andrew Vincent, ‘German Philosophy and British Public Policy: Richard Burdon Haldane in Theory and Practice’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 68.1 (2007), 157–79. 152 Milburn, The ‘Deutschlandbild’ of A. R. Orage, pp. 57, 143–46. Orage, ‘Nietzsche, the Lyrical Bismarck’, pp. 304–05. 153 Garver, ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’, pp. 133–47. 154 See Freeden, The New Liberalism; Collini, Liberalism and Sociology; and Sandra den Otter, British Idealism, and Social Explanation for full accounts. 155 Gourmont, Le Problème de style, p. 61. 156 T. E. Hulme, ‘Searchers After Reality II: Haldane’, NA, 5.17 (19 August 1909), 315–16; CW, pp. 93–98. 157 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, pp. 44–64. 158 Williams, Culture and Society, p. 176. David Kadlec draws a similar connection in ‘Pound, BLAST, and Syndicalism’, ELH: English Literary History, 60.4 (1993), p. 1022. On Flint, see Carr, Verse Revolutionaries, pp. 142–51. 159 ‘Searchers After Reality III’, pp. 107–08; CW, pp. 99–103. 160 Jules de Gaultier, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1902). 161 Consciousness, p. 62. Orage borrows here from ‘recent psychology’, very probably T. H. Huxley’s, ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata and Its History’, Fortnightly Review, 22 (1874), 199–245. 162 Orage, Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism, pp. 15–16. A. R. Orage ‘The New Romanticism’, 50–56. 163 The Aristotelean term ‘entelechy’ appears in Orage’s lecture on human consciousness, first published 1907, and in his Theosophical Review article ‘The New Romanticism’, his New Age articles ‘Towards Socialism II’, NA, 1.24 (10 October 1907), 375 and ‘Unedited Opinions: Contempt for Man’, NA, 9.9 (29 June1911), 203. It may reflect the promotion of the idea by the vitalist biologist Hans Driesch in his Gifford Lectures of 1906 and 1908. The theory of epiphenomenalism is influentially outlined in Huxley’s ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata and Its History’, alluded to in Consciousness, p. 62.

102

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

164 Orage, Consciousness, p. 68. 165 A. R. Orage, ‘Towards Socialism I’, NA, 1.23 (3 October 1907), 361–62 (p. 361). 166 It seems likely that Orage encountered this tale in Swami Vivekananda’s lecture series, ‘Karma Yoga’ (1895–1896), published in Addresses on the Vedanta Religion (1896; repr. in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 5 vols, Almora, Himalayas: Advaita Ashram, 1915–1918), I, p. 96. 167 Orage, ‘Towards Socialism I’, p. 361. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 Vivekenanda’s ideas are discussed by William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), pp. 151–54. 171 Swami Vivekananda uses this phrase in ‘Karma Yoga’: ‘The world is a grand moral gymnasium wherein we have all to take exercise so as to become stronger and stronger spiritually’, Addresses on the Vedanta Religion; repr. in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, I, p. 98. 172 Orage, ‘Towards Socialism I’, p. 361. 173 A. R. Orage, ‘Towards Socialism VI: The Meaning of Liberty’, NA, 2.2 (7 November 1907), 29. 174 Orage [R. M.], ‘The Unpopularity of Socialism’, NA, 3.21 (19 September 1908), 404. 175 Orage, Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism, p. 132. 176 Hardie, My Confession of Faith, p. 13; quoted in Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left, p. 117. 177 Orage, Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age, pp. 37–38. 178 Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left, pp. 147–49, 171–94.

3

The Politics of Classicism

A major polarity in Hulme’s thinking, most clearly stated in the 1912 lecture ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ and the article series of the same year, ‘A Tory Philosophy’, distinguishes between ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’: a distinction separating humanist, liberal-left thinking and a conservative ethic and aesthetic.1 In these pieces, Hulme first declared himself a Tory, a classicist and a believer in Original Sin.2 On first glance, this stance appears to be at odds with Hulme’s enthusiasm for philosophical vitalism and pluralism. To explain this, critics have proposed that a sharp disjunction occurs in Hulme’s thinking between his Bergsonian articles of 1909 and the conservative writing of 1911 and 1912.3 Following Rae’s lead, this chapter argues that there is no contradiction; rather, the two dimensions of Hulme’s work, a vitalism and a desire for classical structure, are simultaneously present from his earliest work onwards.4 It is in fact this synthesis that inspires his Toryism between 1911 and 1912. As Hulme explicitly states that he is defining the ‘romanticism/classicism’ polarity afresh for his own purposes, charges of inconsistency, either with his own earlier work or with earlier usages of those terms by other writers, are negated.5 The ‘classicism’ that Hulme defines and gives his own meaning in 1912 is one constructed in the spirit of Bergsonian – or perhaps more accurately, Jamesian – pluralism. Conservative traits in Hulme’s work can be traced back to his earliest notebooks, which reveal his sense of the limits of human knowledge, a view that would underpin his ideology of pessimism. Similarly, his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908) expresses a conservative desire to purify poetry, to achieve a classical clarity, and his early articles note the merits of projecting a sense of discipline and order, however artificial, upon an incomprehensible universe.6 When Hulme’s writing becomes explicitly political in early 1911, the progression from his earlier writing is a logical one. His vitalism was from the start accompanied by a desire for fixed laws; or, as Rae puts it, his earlier interest in non-rational, intuitive, forms of consciousness and his later interest in

104

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

moral absolutes ‘are legitimate, even essential partners in a pragmatic outlook’.7 This chapter will show how this partnership correlated with a very specific political position. The supposed shift in Hulme’s thinking is usually explained as the influence of Charles Maurras and Pierre Lasserre, the most prominent theorists of the French Neo-Royalist group Action française and advocates of a new nationalist ‘classicism’, whose vigorous attacks on the liberal-left were at their peak at this time.8 Action française called for the restitution of the Bourbon monarchy and condemned the weak liberalism of the Third Republic. They blamed the deterioration of French culture since the eighteenth century on an influx of foreign ideas – most egregiously, the romanticism of Rousseau, which brought about the disaster of the Revolution. This cataclysmic event disrupted a native tradition of noble rule, identifiable with a Mediterranean, Hellenic spirit of ‘classicism’, and set a national trajectory towards compromise and enervation. Galvanized by the Dreyfus case, Maurras’s movement made the case against modern liberal democracy from 1908 through polemical books, weekly and monthly journals and through the activism of the movement’s youth wing, the Camelots du Roi who used acts of violence against culpable liberal figures, including academics and politicians, to make their point. Also among Action française’s enemies were Jews and foreigners; Bergson, a philosopher prone to progressive interpretation, whose ideas and ethnicity were viewed as suspiciously foreign, was a prime target. Hulme admired the group’s campaign against romanticism in both politics and the arts and frequently cited both Maurras and Lasserre from February 1911 onwards.9 As the simplest accounts have it, Hulme read their work around 1910 and, accepting their attacks on Bergson’s philosophy as intrinsically romantic and therefore abhorrent, renounced his enthusiasm for vitalism by 1912. This moment is identified with a change of interest from a philosophy of becoming, of flux, to one of being, of fixed essences; from nominalism to realism, from the stream of consciousness to wilful abstraction; and, in politics, from radical individualism to an impersonal conservatism.10 This chapter argues that there was no such simple transference of allegiance from Bergsonian vitalism to Maurrasian classicism. The Neo-Royalist writers were stylistic models, but Hulme’s conservatism retained its roots in a different philosophical tradition and was expressed through different cultural priorities. When Hulme first declared his conservative belief in ‘the fixed and constant nature of man’, in the same breath, he described himself as ‘a pluralist’ in the Jamesian sense.11 He retained a strong interest in forms of pragmatism and vitalism that Maurras, an admirer of the French ‘rational’ tradition of Comte

The Politics of Classicism

105

and Descartes, explicitly rejected. Hulme was drawn to the literary and artistic avant-garde and to political circles that mingled left and right ideas, both intellectual projects that Maurras denounced. Maurras and Lasserre stood for Hulme as figureheads for the renovation of long-standing conservative attitudes; Hulme admired their ‘precise and lucid’ style but did not slavishly adopt their arguments.12 Indeed these writers, hardliners on such matters, would not have accepted Hulme as one of their camp. For example, Maurras’s theory included a willingness to celebrate human excellence which contrasted with Hulme’s profound sense of human limitation. Surprisingly, few critics note how Hulme differed from Action française in important ways, a difference recognized by at least one of his contemporaries. D. L. Murray, whom Hulme first met in Spring 1911, recalled that there was a ‘fundamental opposition between the classicism and humanism of Maurras, which led to his almost deification of Pheidias and the sculpture of the Parthenon, and Hulme’s stern relegation of humanity and its dreams to a subordinate place in a formidable, iron universe of non-human law’.13 The most significant area of difference is in Hulme’s philosophical argument for classicism. Maurras and Lasserre repeatedly invoke the ‘eternal laws of nature’, ‘the permanent order’, intrinsic particularly to French national culture.14 Hulme’s classicism was always founded on a belief that political and philosophical attitudes were fictions tailored to please their authors’ tastes. Idealist and empirical philosophies, Hulme argues in his earliest notebooks, are equally superficial – fabricated maps, consoling props, in a universe we can never wholly understand. He presents the Maurassian worldview as one such map among many. It is, however, clear that Hulme was drawn to the Neo-Royalist attitude, even as he noted its constructed nature. Behind the habitual, relentless scepticism of his early writing lays an appetite for fixed structures. The very impossibility of achieving ‘truths’ convinced him of the need for a wilful, fictional, imposition of order. Paradoxically, Hulme’s conservatism is predicated on relativism, his realism on nominalism. These two layers of his thought are not often seen simultaneously, resulting in charges of inconsistency. We have to see both in operation at the same time. This chapter places Hulme within the field of French classicisms among a heterodox group of French writers who broke with Maurras’s strict code, a network of pragmatist and vitalist thinkers pursuing links between the radical left and right, and attempting to convey this revolutionary new classicism in experimental literature and art. Hulme’s own writing, drawing on a tradition of crowd psychology, mediates between a Bergsonian and a Maurrasian position

106

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

during 1911–1912 but finally achieves a new synthesis, retaining a vitalist root but adopting a classicist style. Finally, I relate Hulme once again to his London milieu, placing him in relation to British classicisms, distinguishing him from the radical and Christian right and identifying him alongside Orage as a kind of pragmatist. Both in French and English contexts, this attempt to find a classicist ‘family resemblance’ works to distinguish Hulme from certain proto-fascist strands.

Hulme’s classicism Hulme’s conservative instincts are not fully clear in his earliest New Age articles – indeed, he could be mistaken for a socialist, as we have seen – but the picture becomes clearer in his last piece of 1909, on Jules de Gaultier. As noted in Chapter 2, Gaultier had featured in the bleak survey of the ‘cindery world’ in Hulme’s early notebooks, and Rae has pointed out his importance as a point of connection between Hulme’s Imagism and his later classicism.15 Rae’s argument is that this is the basis of a continuity running throughout Hulme’s career, a position with which I concur. Gaultier’s work Le Bovarysme (1902) proposed a form of fictionalism akin to that of Nietzsche and Vaihinger. This rejection of the engrained faith in human reason embodied in progressive politics leads logically to a pessimistic view of human endeavour and a circular view of history. Gaultier took an interest in the French right-wing group Action française and wrote for its newspapers from 1905. He not only provided a philosophical pathway towards the right but discussed these connections with Hulme himself: in a letter of November 1911, Hulme recalled how Gaultier told him of the developing collaboration between French nationalists and socialists.16 This intrigued Hulme who, like many contemporaries in France and Britain, began to see correlations between his literary-philosophical interests and recent political developments in both countries. The first steps towards this political theory were prompted by events in British politics from 1909 to 1911, to which Hulme responded with an analysis clearly informed by radical French thought. He disapproved of the Liberals’ emasculating reform of the House of Lords, prompted by the Tory obstruction of the National Insurance bill of 1909, and, despite having flirted with socialism in his youth, found himself drawn increasingly to the right.17 His comrades defending the upper house were a motley crew, including Nietzschean fanatics of eugenics like Anthony Ludovici and Tory Die-Hards such as Willoughby de

The Politics of Classicism

107

Broke. Hulme proved himself to be a distinctive voice among the British right, partly due to his French sources, both vitalist and Neo-Royalist. The latter came to the fore sometime during 1910 when Hulme read about the activities of Action française, and by early 1911, the Maurrasian term ‘classicism’ entered his vocabulary.18 Rather than tracing an extended genealogy of ‘classicism’, it is simpler to acknowledge, as Hulme did, that the term had by 1912 been used so frequently to denote so many different things that it had lost any exact meaning.19 As Rae notes, efforts to pin Hulme down or to expose his contradictions within a narrative of several centuries are somewhat irrelevant.20 He was using the term to mean something to his own mind, spelt out in his essays, and recoverable by cross-reference with a number of his contemporaries in France and England who used it in the same period. It was a construction of that time, and if it appealed to historical contexts, then its fidelity to that history is less important than its purpose in the present. Leaving aside the much earlier history of these terms, it was in France during the Third Republic that a modern, ideological meaning of  ‘classicism’ hardened.21 Recent scholarship has established a widespread, nationalist use of the term; historians of art, in particular, have recently paid close attention to its rise from 1870 through to the 1930s. Kenneth Silver’s influential account of the pre-war avant-garde paved the way for studies by Mark Antliff, James Herbert and David Cottington.22 More recently, essays by Neil McWilliam, Laura Morowitz and Gaetano DeLeonibus have added valuable detail to this discussion.23 As Neil McWilliam puts it, the usage of ‘classicism’ was ‘ideologically inspired, and predominantly, though not exclusively associated with the integral nationalism of Action française’. As he notes, ‘in many respects the ideological ramifications of royalism’s appeal to a classical tradition extending back to the ancient Mediterranean cultures of Greece and Rome remain imperfectly understood’.24 Maurras’s achievement was to establish a seemingly natural association of classicism with the right. This had been less clear over the previous century as conservatives like Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine railed against the follies of the classically minded Enlightenment and their fruition in the Terror.25 Conversely, romanticism had previously been associated with right-wing politics: Maistre, the leading conservative critic of the Revolution, borrowed ideas from German romantic texts via Madame de Staël, and, as Maurras noted, the Republicans of 1830 identified (in his view erroneously) their Royalist enemies as ‘romantics’.26 Similarly, Hippolyte Taine’s history of modern France had identified the origins of revolution, both in 1789

108

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

and in 1870, in a misguided ‘esprit classique’, originating in the superficial rationalism made fashionable by Enlightenment writers. Maurras, in many ways the inheritor of Maistre and Taine’s counterrevolutionary rhetoric, rejected their attack on what he saw as the quintessentially French tradition of ‘classicist’ rationalism. Instead, he identified a tradition running from seventeenth-century neoclassicism and Cartesian rationalism, through the purer, native elements of the Enlightenment, to the positivism of Comte. Maurras’s history was selective and tendentious; many of the problems Hulme faced between 1911 and 1912 in reconciling his philosophical and his political tastes in fact reflect Maurras’s reconfiguration, in some cases distortion, of long-standing conservative beliefs. Maurras’s worldview is best encapsulated in the early essay ‘Idées françaises ou idées suisses’, published in Action française in 1899, which described the penetration of romantic ideas into France, first through the German influence of the Reformation; later, through the misguided intellectual curiosity of Montesquieu and Voltaire; and, most egregiously, through the interventions of the Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to Maurras, this corruption of pure French classicism resulted in the Revolution and continued to poison French culture through the nineteenth century.27 Hulme may have read the original essay, but there is clear evidence that he absorbed the version of this argument promoted by Maurras’s close collaborator, Pierre Lasserre. Lasserre expanded upon Maurras’s ideas in his doctoral dissertation, Romantisme français (1907), frequently cited by Hulme. This repeated Maurras’s history of Romanticism, adding elements drawn from Nietzsche, particularly from The Genealogy of Morals. Lasserre’s later book, La Morale du Nietzsche, also cited by Hulme, recommends a classical morality rather than the Christian spirit of self-abnegation. Tied to this was the Nietzschean vision of the aristocracy of Übermenschen. We can see how Lasserre could superimpose these ideas upon Maurras’s history of a French classical tradition contaminated by Romanticism, blaming the brand of Judeo–Christian morality promulgated by the Protestant Reformation.28 Action française’s emphasis on the Cartesian tradition was nationalist in spirit: ‘foreign’ forms of romantic vitalism were considered suspect. The intellectual history drawn by Maurras and Lasserre was racially inflected, and this affected their response to contemporary thought, particularly in the wake of the Dreyfus affair. Maurras’s myth of a rationalist and positivist national culture also identified the enemies of French culture, under the four classes of Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and foreigners (or ‘métèques’): the ‘quatre états

The Politics of Classicism

109

confédérés’. These distinctions were used to target the half-Jewish, half-English Bergson, in particular, as his form of vitalism reached a peak of popularity. Indeed, Hulme’s relations with Action française must be seen in light of the pre-war ‘Bergsonian controversy’.29 The rise of Bergson’s influence between the publication of L’Évolution créatrice in 1907 and his election to the Académie française in 1914 was welcomed by some Catholics and conservatives who saw him as a champion of spiritual values against positivism. For certain groups on the right, however, his prominence created certain problems, not only on philosophical but also on ethnic grounds. Maurras and Lasserre, particularly in the pre-war years, were aggressively opposed to the ‘Scottish Jew’ Bergson and sought to block his election to the Académie.30 In 1910–1911, Lasserre lectured on Bergson at the Institut d’Action française, condemning his thought as foreign to the French classical tradition. However, Bergson’s anti-intellectualism remained appealing to many who called themselves ‘classicist’. Consequently, many young French intellectuals, attracted both by Action française and the ‘spiritualist’ dimensions of Bergson’s thought, were forced between 1910 and 1914 to side with one or the other or form some synthesis of their own.31 The position was complicated by the exponential growth in Bergson’s popularity, and the often crude appropriation of his terms and ideas in progressive discourse. Observing this conflict of interests, Hulme sketched his own possible solutions, but from the tenor of his later writing, we can see that he never wholly subscribed to the Maurrasian argument, although it persuaded him to modify his Bergsonism in some ways. Indeed, to understand the continuity between Hulme’s early and late writing, we must not only keep in view that pragmatist and vitalist thinkers led Hulme towards a conservative position prior to his discovery of Action française, but also consider some of the younger French writers who reworked Maurras and Lasserre’s ideas, often against their grain, linking them to philosophers like Bergson and to advanced socialist theorists of ‘myth’ such as Georges Sorel.32 Hulme’s attention was caught by the remarkable pre-war alliance of syndicalism and Neo-Royalism, conceived not by Maurras, but by his younger followers. The intermediary figures here, such as Georges Valois, Édouard Berth, Henri Clouard and Henri Lagrange, were Hulme’s counterparts, both in age and intellectual profile.33 Their controversial merger of radical right and left activism, explored in a discussion group known as the Cercle Proudhon – and especially its house journal, the Revue critique des idées et des livres (1908–1924) – is often cited as the birthplace of fascist ideology.34 They began their project with Maurras’s blessing, but before long, he objected to their journal, which, through its interest

110

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

in Sorel, drew on vitalist philosophy. As Eugen Weber has shown, Maurras was outraged ‘by the appreciation shown for Henri Bergson by Clouard, Maire, and their followers’.35 Moreover, just as Maurras and Lasserre were increasingly hostile to the Revue Critique, they also condemned the appropriation of ‘classicism’ to promote avant-garde art. Action française adopted a highly selective attitude to aesthetics, applying Maurras’s theory of a ‘critical’ tradition to discern the romanticism behind David’s revolutionary classicism, similar contaminations in Ingres, individualism in impressionism and an excessive hermeticism in Symbolism.36 Hulme’s tastes in art and literature were clearly very different. Yet, in combining Neo-Royalist rhetoric with a taste in radical art forms, he was not alone. The pre-war revival of classicism was of great interest to the French avant-garde, whose work was also conspicuously at odds with Maurras’s preferred canon. As Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten have shown in detail, Cubists and Symbolists began to present themselves as ‘classicists’.37 Thus, the post-war rappel à l’ordre, so named by Jean Cocteau, was prefigured by a belle époque rhetoric of classical order, applied at that time to abstract formalism.38 As we have seen, Hulme was deeply indebted to the late Symbolist tradition of Gustave Kahn and Remy de Gourmont, cultivated famously at the Mercure de France. Maurras had moved in symbolist circles in his youth, but by 1909, his recommendation was that French art regain its equilibrium, achieving a classical balance that would be modern but stylistically faithful to an established French tradition. Exemplary writers and artists for Action française were Corneille and Racine, Poussin and Ingres.39 In contrast, Hulme had more in common with the heterodox ‘classicism’ cultivated in France by publications like Adrien Mithouard’s L’Occident (1901), publisher of writers like Tancrède de Visan, whose commitment to a Bergsonian symbolism Hulme admired in 1911, and Maurice Denis, founder of the Nabi group of painters, many of whom were known in England as ‘post-impressionists’. In L’Occident, a pride in national tradition, influenced by Maurras’s rhetoric, was extended to all forms of French art, including impressionism and expressionism, as products of an indigenous ‘classicist’ culture. The narrative of French culture was reorientated, and while still taking in the Latin influences celebrated by Maurras, the locus of French national culture was now in the Middle Ages, rather than the Renaissance.40 The importance of Bergson for artists and writers such as Denis and Visan prompted Maurras’s disapproval of such avant-garde ‘classicisms’. Hulme’s classicism was necessarily different to Maurras’s, in that he was English, and adapted Maurras’s politics to appeal to his British contemporaries – but he was also, like Denis and Visan, committed to avant-garde work

The Politics of Classicism

111

in literature and art and retained an interest in Bergson and philosophies of intuition. Thus, we can see the areas in which Hulme adopted a classicism distinct from Maurras’s: in politics and philosophy, he was closer to the Cercle Proudhon, and the Revue critique des idées et livres; in literature and art, he was closer to the Symbolist and Cubist innovators at L’Occident. Later, the rift between Maurras and younger writers interested in Sorel generated two journals associated with the Cercle Proudhon, the abortive Cité française (1910), planned but never published by Georges Valois and Edouard Berth; and Valois’s eventual venue for Sorelian classicism, L’Indépendance (1911–1913). These papers too hosted debates on modern art and literature, including forms of Symbolism and Cubism, the latter promoted here, once again, by Denis.41 Maurras’s work had provided a model for the nationalist attitudes of all these groups and journals, but while retaining the spirit and style of Action française, their divergence from its orthodoxy is clear, not least in the often aggressive responses they garnered from Maurras and his closest allies. The split in France between pure Maurrasian classicism and that of the Revue Critique on one hand, and L’Indépendance on the other, sheds important light on the tensions in Hulme’s classicism. The contrasting attitudes of these French journals illustrate a clash of philosophies, between a Nietzschean, Bergsonian, Jamesian line which took great interest in non-rational forms of cognition; and a second, held dear by Charles Maurras, which was a rationalist (and classically ‘French’), inheritance running from Descartes through Comte. To some extent, Hulme’s problem originated in Maurras’s own inconsistencies – for his ‘rationalist’ movement paradoxically relied on very irrational acts of violence, reminiscent of the anarchist outrages of the 1890s; indeed, it was this feature of Action française that caught Hulme’s attention.42 Hulme followed a line of conservative analysts of irrationalism in politics, but in moving from this background towards the NeoRoyalist cause, he inevitably clashed with Maurras and Lasserre, who celebrated the rational and demonized ‘foreign’ theories of intuition. To understand this, we must see how, in France, the poles of rationalism and intuition, classicism and romanticism and right and left were by no means neatly homologous but appeared in various permutations, long before Hulme’s career began.

From crowd psychology to Action française The connecting point between Hulme’s interest in conceptualization and his interest in politics lays in his reading of crowd psychology, a discipline closely related to the vitalist psychology of Ribot and Bergson. Hulme engaged

112

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

in this debate in a series of articles on ‘the art of political conversion’ for the Commentator, a conservative journal, in early 1911. Hulme’s ‘Note on the Art of Political Conversion’, his first article of 1911, directly cites crowd psychologists like Gustave Le Bon, who argued that there was a fundamental difference between the abstract thinkers who led the country and the cruder thought processes of the masses.43 Hulme also cites the Fabian theorist, Graham Wallas, who arrived at the same distinction in his study of voting habits, Human Nature in Politics (1908).44 At first, Hulme seems to follow suit in making a distinction between ‘two processes of conversion – that en masse, and that of the intellectuals’, with ‘two quite different methods of attack, for what attracts the one repels the other’. But it is the case of the ‘intellectual’ or ‘leisured middle class wobbler’ that really interests Hulme.45 His analysis differs from Wallas or Le Bon, however, in his insistence that all levels of political reasoning are essentially metaphoric, whether they occur among the masses or the intellectual elite. Intellectuals merely disguise a core metaphor in layers of conceptual elaboration. At the heart of arguments for Free Trade, for instance, lies a persistent metaphor in the West of the wisdom of encouraging the social body, like a physical organism, to thrive without intervention – of ‘natural growth’. Hulme traces the image back to its origins in medieval medicine. Around this core, metaphor grows an extensive intellectual history, taking in, for example, Manchester School Economics and Edward Grey’s rejection of Colonial Preference. Modern liberalism is rooted upon an image, which binds together sets of ideas in the most non-rational way. This is why political prejudice is so difficult to uproot through argument – because it is non-rational. Hulme compares the ‘free trade’ idea to a tumour: ‘I probed my mind and got rid of it […] but the operation was a violent one.’46 What Hulme is describing is what Hippolyte Taine called the ‘idée fixe’ – an ingrown cliché. He goes on to consider how, linguistically, its excision might take place. It is worth noting Taine’s importance as one who provided a definition of ‘classicism’ in terms of psychological states and mass politics. A leading French positivist psychologist of the mid-century, he was a key influence, not only on Ribot and Bergson, but also on the new science of crowd psychology. He too worked within the empirical tradition of associationism, identifying the roots of ideas in sense impressions. Hulme’s debt to Taine is evident in ‘Notes on Language and Style’, in which he describes how concepts are formed, as if by stripping a tree of its branches and leaves: ‘We cut the leaves off …. When the tree becomes a mast, the leaves become unnecessary.’47 Martin points out that this is indebted to Taine’s description of how we strip away visual elements:

The Politics of Classicism

113

‘[The] word so reduced is not however a lifeless symbol, without traces of signification; it is more like the trunk of a tree, stripped of its leaves and branches.’48 In the manner of Locke and Hume, Taine describes the development of concepts out of sense impressions, but he adds a new element of evolutionary motivation. Ideas are formed from those sense impressions that most attract our consciousness. As certain associations become increasingly clear and definite, they become unhealthily dominant and disconnected from their sensory origins – what Taine calls idée fixes. There is, Taine suggests, a spectrum of understanding, moving from the raw sense impression towards the idée fixe. A mind operating at either far end of this spectrum is inclined to a dangerous lack of moderation. Taine’s legacy to Ribot, Bergson and Hulme is clear: the distinction between the raw sense impression and the refined concept, as developed by Ribot among others, clearly anticipates Bergson’s contrast between intuitive and conceptual life. Moreover, Taine gave these categories an ideological significance which anticipates much of Hulme’s 1911 rhetoric regarding Bergson. The intuitiverational spectrum is politicized in Taine’s psychological history of the Revolution, in which he condemns the violence of the revolutionary mob as validated by the small Jacobin clique that led the Terror. He identifies the mob with the raw sense impressions of the primitive mind, and their leaders with an unhealthy, extreme mental abstraction. These two groups interact and spur each other on, the destructive power of the crowd harnessed by the dominant voices of the leaders in the same way raw sense impressions are subordinated to the idée fixe. Moreover, crucially, Taine identified the spirit of this dynamic as ‘classicist’. In his view, Enlightenment reason, the esprit classique was associated with excessive confidence in a priori reasoning.49 Faith in human reason led to unrealistic social planning by Jacobin leaders, whose fervour in turn inspired and legitimised the mob’s acts of irrational violence. Taine in this way identifies the classical spirit as the source of both the elite’s tyrannous idée fixe and the anarchy of the mass mind. Maurras did not accept Taine’s account of ‘classicism’; nor, as a rationalist, did he subscribe to its psychological theory.50 Yet, ironically, Action française manifested exactly the pattern described by Taine, its intellectual elite trading in the idée fixe of universal reason and the classical spirit, while its activists caused havoc in the streets of the Latin Quarter. Maurras’s rejection of crowd psychology, in theory if not in practice, puts him at odds with Hulme’s classicism. While Taine’s account provides an obvious precedent for Hulme’s recurring metaphor connecting the masses with intuition and the governing class with

114

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

the reasoning mind, a key intermediary was Gustave Le Bon, author of the most influential early text in French social psychology, La psychologie des foules (1895; English translation The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1896). Le Bon’s work places great store upon the power of the image to persuade, describing the mass mind as imagistic, feminine, animalistic and non-rational.51 This level of consciousness has much in common with the pre-rational, Bergsonian élan vital, which in turn is closely related to the Imagist aesthetic. Hulme’s insistence that all thought is constructed on this imagistic basis connects his poetic theory with his references to crowd psychology. At the heart of Hulme’s discussion of crowd psychology is the poetic theory he had developed over the previous few years. His account culminates, in ‘The Art of Political Conversion’, with a restatement of his theory of metaphor, transplanted almost without alteration from his discussions in the 1908 ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ and his 1909 essay on Haldane.52 Using the example again of the phrase ‘the hill is clothed with trees’, Hulme remarks the dulling of this once fresh visual juxtaposition over time, to the point where it lacks vibrancy and merely conveys an abstract meaning: to give it real communicative power, he suggests, one would need to replace the word ‘clothed’ with ‘ruffed’, making the image fresh once again. Similarly, he argues, political rhetoric relies on slogans, for example ‘rights of property’ or ‘for king and country’, which begin as fresh, new ideas that catch attention, but through overuse become abstracted, tokens so familiar that they fail to convey tangible meaning. Thus, we witness ‘the death of a set of political catch-words’, particularly those of Salisburyan conservatism, whose ‘phrases feel dead in exactly the same way as clichés in bad poetry’.53 Any metaphor or image in time becomes conventionalised and so ceases to convey any real concrete meaning. The result of this is that you must have freshness and unexpectedness in any art, not because there is anything desirable in freshness per se, but because … it is only by means of freshness that one can be convincing. This makes my position clear in regard to the dead phrases by which Conservatism expresses itself.54

The function of poetry, creating new metaphors to reinvigorate our sense of reality, is now re-presented as that of the political propagandist, perhaps best exemplified by the Liberal image of the nation as an organism, a body or a garden, that should be left to grow naturally without interference. Hulme had already elevated metaphor beyond the status of decoration, or even merely the substance of verse, presenting it instead as the basic device in human cognition. Now, he considers its central role in political persuasion. To create new metaphors is not

The Politics of Classicism

115

merely to renew our sense of reality, but to create a reality for others. The novelty of two superimposed images is the key to the successful conversion. Drawing upon a poetic theory that sought to intensify personal cognition, Hulme now discusses how one might project such a cognitive process upon a community. This is in essence what Gaultier recommended at a philosophical level in his fictionalism.55 It resonates with the emphasis on visual logic in the crowd theory of Le Bon and later Sorel. Thus the interests of Hulme’s early career, the intuitive nature of consciousness and the cognitive role of metaphor developed into a view of all politics as an aesthetic pose. The scepticism regarding the potential of human reasoning that is the basis of his conservatism is already implicit here. Ten days after his first Commentator series ended, Hulme first stated, in the New Age, his belief in the ‘classical ideal of the fixed and constant nature of man’.56

Hulme’s mediation between Bergson and Maurras Hulme’s writing from April 1911 to June 1912 captures the tension between his interest in vitalist psychology and his taste for Maurras’s and Lasserre’s antiromanticism. Related to this, in complex ways, is Hulme’s decision to split his journalism into two projects: writing on political theory in the conservative paper, the Commentator, under the name of Thomas Gratton, while continuing his discussion of Bergson and related subjects in the New Age on Bergson, under his own signature. What followed, however, was not simply a process of progressive disillusion with Bergson culminating with a complete rift, as some critics have suggested.57 Such accounts overlook Hulme’s frequent evasion, or modification, of Action française principles, often to accommodate his persistent view of consciousness as split between rational surfaces and irrational depths. Consequently, we see Hulme manoeuvring himself among heretical versions of classicism, many of which the fastidious Maurras and Lasserre had denounced. One suspects that a large part of the appeal of Action française for Hulme, besides its general worldview and style, was its success in reaching across an apparent political gulf in order to woo the extreme left. For Hulme, this was a vivid illustration of the fundamental relativism of political opinion itself. However, for Maurras, as Eugen Weber has shown, his famous dalliance with Sorelian syndicalism was opportunistic, an attempt to harness the working class and students to the royalist cause by playing on their fierce opposition to the Third Republic. The moment soon passed, and

116

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

the Neo-Realist appeal to the working class was replaced by a blunt rejection of left-wing priorities.58 For some intellectuals, however, the experiment had had a greater meaning, and it was with these few thinkers that Hulme can be ranked. The Bergsonian Sorel would be the most persistent source of reference for his future writing on the philosophy of politics, not the Cartesian Maurras. In April 1911, Hulme attended the International Philosophical Congress in Bologna. En route, he stopped at Dieppe to meet Gaultier and then travelled on to Paris, where he visited Lasserre.59 Both encouraged Hulme’s conservative turn in different ways: Gaultier spoke of his appreciation for Action française but did so from the point of view of a ‘Bovaryist’, who viewed political attitudes as constructions with which to face the universe. As Hulme put it in his admiring 1909 commentary on Gaultier, ‘one can never discover the secret of the cosmos, one merely finds elaborate and complete ways of expressing one’s personal attitude towards it’.60 Lasserre in contrast advocated Maurras’s version of French philosophic history as one of hard rationalism and condemned forms of vitalist or pragmatist thinking – above all Bergson’s theory of creative evolution – as dangerously ahistorical: the ‘necessary and permanent characteristics of any social order’ would be overlooked if history were treated as ‘perpetual novelty’.61 A subtext to this logic was a racialization of intellectual debate: foreign forms of ‘romantic’ philosophy were suspect, and Bergson’s half-English, half-Jewish descent made him a prime target.62 Hulme would publish an account of Lasserre’s attack on vitalism, but he did not do so until several months after their conversation and then reserved judgement, commenting that ‘if I thought this was true, I would be compelled to change my views considerably’.63 His delay and caution in reporting the conversation suggests that meanwhile he struggled to reconcile his admiration for Lasserre’s classicism with his own vitalist instincts. These apparently contradictory strands of Hulme’s thinking were already being entwined during the Philosophical Congress, a major international gathering, which Hulme attended as a member of the Aristotelian Society. It was in his New Age report from Bologna that he declared both his ‘pluralism’ and his belief in ‘the fixed nature of man’.64 As defined in William James’s The Pluralistic Universe (1909), ‘pluralism’ referred to the belief that multiple truths could operate for different individuals within one world. The term was used enthusiastically not only by Hulme but by his British companions in Italy, the Oxford philosopher F. C. S. Schiller and his student D. L. Murray, both admirers of James’s philosophy. Indeed, pluralism was the prevailing spirit of the congress: Bergson, whose work James cited in his 1909 work, was one of the

The Politics of Classicism

117

main speakers, delivering his paper on ‘Philosophical Intuition’. James himself withdrew from the event owing to illness, but his influence was clearly felt, not least through interest in the latest fashionable Italian philosophy which he had done much to promote. Schiller’s report from Bologna made topical reference to the young Florentine thinker Giovanni Papini’s ‘corridor theory’ – the belief in the validity of multiple, coexisting worldviews, imagined as rooms equally visible from a hotel corridor – a metaphor used prominently in James’s Pragmatism (1907).65 Two months earlier, Hulme had cited the work of Papini’s friend Giuseppe Prezzolini as an example of philosophical irrationalism.66 Prezzolini and Papini would later contribute to the intellectual formulations of Fascism on the grounds that, in a world of plural realities, the nature of truth was decided by the most strident creator of meaning. On the basis of this ‘perspectivism’, to use Nietzsche’s term, human individuals of sufficient mental vigour could dictate the nature of truth to those around them. Papini’s debts to the Twilight of the Idols and The Genealogy of Morals took him in a different direction to James, leading him to imagine the birth of an Übermensch-like ‘man-God’, the ‘uomo dio’.67 Hulme was more or less receptive then to two lines of thought both capable of leading to Fascism: the essentialist, ‘rationalist’ route taken by the French Neo-Royalists and the perspectivism of the Florentine group. Although interested in both, Hulme’s political trajectory did not correspond exactly to either. He reserved judgement regarding Lasserre’s treatment of Bergson, and although he cited Papini in his discussion of the irrational bases of political conversion, he did not subscribe to the latter’s theory of the ‘uomo-dio’.68 It is telling that James’s take on Papini’s ‘corridor theory’ led him similarly in a different ideological direction as an American liberal. Liberalism, it might be argued, is as much a politics of conflict as Fascism. A tradition of political pluralism informed both, as historians of ideology have noted.69 Indeed, not long after his return from Italy, Hulme, so often identified with forms of elitist and fascist authoritarianism, in fact aligned himself with a far more moderate view of power. In August 1911, his piece ‘On Progress and Democracy’ in the Commentator expressed a belief in an orderly society, but the one he had in mind was that of the American constitution. The notion of checks and balances and a pluralist distribution of power overrode an emphasis on authority centralized in the hands of one individual or elite group.70 Moreover, Hulme showed a marked resistance to Action Française’s racial theory only weeks after his meeting with Lasserre, during a dispute in the New Age’s correspondence page. A German correspondent, Gustav Hübener, in

118

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

the midst of a debate with John Middleton Murry, had noted the ‘non-French’ attributes of Bergson. In his response, Hulme not only dismissed this ‘racial romance’ as ‘tedious’, but went further in aligning himself explicitly against the Maurrasian pantheon of authentically ‘French’ rationalists. Specifically, he repeated Taine’s condemnation of shallow, a priori rationalism for its tendency to degenerate into the dazzling bon mots of Enlightenment high society, the neatness of which became lethal in the hands of Marat and Robespierre. Hulme identified instead with a tradition running through Pascal, via Maine de Biran, to Bergson. Their emphasis on intuition and vital impulse, Hulme pointed out, had an equally integral place in French national culture. Indeed, histories of French philosophy frequently contrasted the Cartesian and Pascalian traditions as two aspects of the country’s intellectual heritage.71 Maurras preferred the former; Hulme preferred the latter. By saying as much, Hulme was taking issue with Lasserre’s anti-Bergsonism and denying the relevance of Maurras’s theory of the métèque.72 His detachment from Action française’s position was confirmed by his August 1911 review of Tancrède de Visan’s L’Attitude du lyrisme contemporain, a study of symbolist poets in the light of Bergson’s philosophy.73 Visan, echoing Taine, suggested that literature and the arts reflected the philosophical character of their day. The foundational principle of late symbolist vers libre, he argued, was that of Bergson’s élan vital.74 Recounting this enthusiastically, Hulme restated his admiration for a vitalist, post-Symbolist poetic theory. This approval was all the more significant since Visan had made an enemy of Action française critics by provocatively describing his Bergsonian aesthetic as ‘classicist’ while dismissing the rationalist tradition as outdated – a direct contradiction of Maurrasian orthodoxy. Indeed, as Mark Antliff has shown in detail, Visan’s ‘classicism’ was neither Southern, Latin, Mediterranean, nor Catholic in character but laid claim to an entirely different tradition of French national culture, deriving from Celtic roots.75 Compelling historical precedents may have been invoked by Maurras and Lasserre to support their Latin ideal, but equally numerous sources could be marshalled to support this alternative French nationalism. Relatedly, Visan’s discussion of art’s role as a medium for the inner self had pantheistic and Germanic leanings and gravitated towards a Byzantine rather than Hellenic style. Variations on this alternative ‘classicist’ aesthetic were noticeable among a number of avantgarde writers and artists, including the painter-critic Maurice Denis, whose theory of abstraction informed Hulme’s later visual theory, as we shall see in the next chapter.76

The Politics of Classicism

119

The turn against Bergson Despite his persistent interest in Bergson’s ideas, Hulme was increasingly uncomfortable with the philosopher’s growing celebrity. In early August, he had expressed disquiet at the appropriation of vitalism to support progressive rhetoric, and in late October, after attending one of Bergson’s lectures at University College London, he described his sense of overwhelming disillusion at the spectacle of fashionable London society vying to hear the philosopher speak.77 The gender politics of this crisis point were crude: in terms that recalled aspects of Le Bon’s crowd psychology, Hulme identifies the masses – in this case the largely female lecture theatre audience – as herd-like and unreflective. The redeeming feature of the piece is Hulme’s sense of his own absurdity and irrationalism at resenting the public discovery of what had once been private knowledge.78 Recoiling from the cheapening of ideas he once held dear, Hulme a week later published an account of his April conversation with Lasserre, finally indicating he might take the Action française case against Bergson seriously. He omitted the racial aspect of Lasserre’s argument but recounted its philosophic logic almost verbatim. Yet he also sounded a note of caution and, in standing slightly apart from Lasserre’s conclusions, avoided publicly breaking his ties with Bergson, although his loyalty was clearly strained.79 Ironically, this was the moment when Hulme had a new cachet as Bergson’s translator and promoter in Britain. Not only was he invited to write a full series of New Age articles on Bergson (a series that proved to be riven with anxiety over romantic and progressivist interpretations of the philosopher’s work), but he was also asked to deliver a series of public lectures himself.80 Pound attended the latter, and thus it was in the midst of a conflicted, incomplete philosophical synthesis that Hulme managed to communicate certain of his key ideas to their most effective literary publicist. Anticipations of the Imagist aesthetic can be found in the lectures, which were posthumously published in the New Age as ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ and in Speculations as ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’.81 Yet, just as Pound was picking up traces of Hulme’s Bergsonian vitalism, the latter was falling under the influence of Maurras and Lasserre, whose ideas, arguably, also left a trace in the Imagist school of poetry (finally named in late 1912 and defined in Pound’s criticism over the following two years).82 What is clear is that Hulme’s influence among the leading theorists of Imagism was both partial and disputed. For example, both Pound and Flint misread Hulme to some degree, the latter registering the importance of Bergson, but misinterpreting him as a purveyor of a romantic metaphysics,

120

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

who recommended setting ‘vibrating the infinity within us, by the exquisite juxtaposition of images’.83 Pound disavowed any receptivity to Hulme’s ‘crap about Bergson’ but seems to rehearse some of Hulme’s Bergsonian and Maurrasian thinking in his 1911 concept of the ‘luminous moment’ and in his 1912 call for a new literary classicism, a poetry that was ‘classic’, and ‘austere, direct, free from emotional slither’.84 However, Pound’s references to other sources in recent British psychology, and his underlying, persistent Neoplatonism, complicate any simple genealogy.85 Such inconsistences in no way lessen the power of these poets’ work in its own right, nor the validity of their forms of ‘Imagism’, although that term’s definition would soon be fiercely contested, as Flint and Pound quarrelled over the relative influences of Hulme and Ford Madox Hueffer.86 This study limits itself to considering a Hulmean ‘poetry of images’, but this can be seen within a narrative of modernism that includes Imagism as named and defined by Pound in particular. Imagism, loosely conceived as it was, might be described as a kind of ‘Discord Club’ bringing together writers with some common and some diverging interests – another case of ‘family resemblances’. In July 1912, Hulme delivered his lecture ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. It consolidated a number of statements he had been making in recent months; for example, a lecture at Cambridge early in the year dealt at length with ‘Original Sin’, the conviction that humanity is fundamentally flawed and incapable of improvement. The result is a conservative ideology and an aesthetics that seeks hard, rigid forms. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ begins by restating Hulme’s belief in these principles and setting out his reasoning, but paradoxically, a large component of the lecture repeats a theory of poetry derived largely from Bergson, almost unchanged from its appearance in Hulme’s 1908 ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, his 1909 essay on Haldane and his 1911 series on political conversion.87 Much has been said about the contradictions of this text, not just in its reliance on Bergson but also its references to Keats and Coleridge to demonstrate the qualities of a ‘classicist’ aesthetic. Rae is right to emphasize that Hulme is defining ‘classicism’ in his own terms; and, like the heterodox classicists of the Parisian avant-garde, what he outlines is a Bergsonian, organicist aesthetic, a conservatism predicated on vitalism.88 The role of Maurras and Lasserre as cited in this piece is in fact limited: their denunciation of Bergson is not registered, although their contribution as stylists, and exponents of a general ideological spirit, is. Conversely, the vitalism apparent here is a distinctively pessimistic one, which, while acknowledging the non-rational bases of consciousness, makes no commitment to an ideology of progress and spiritual advance. With these

The Politics of Classicism

121

caveats, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, delivered several months after the crisis in the UCL lecture hall, reveals the established place that Bergson retained in Hulme’s thinking, despite his enthusiasm for Action française. The lecture was also a direct influence on the Imagist school; advertised in Harold Monro’s Poetry Magazine, and no doubt attended by a largely literary audience, it remains a canonical work of literary criticism and the best-known statement regarding aesthetics that Hulme produced. In the following weeks, he wrote a five-part series in the Commentator entitled ‘A Tory Philosophy’, his most concentrated work on politics so far.89 Despite the citations of Maurras and Lasserre that open the series, Hulme diverges from their position as he continues to draw ‘a complicated line’ around his position. Maurras and Lasserre’s names again appear together – as shorthand to stand for Action française’s style, as much as its particular stance, which Hulme treats in cavalier fashion. He opens ‘A Tory Philosophy’ by prominently acknowledging that ‘Lasserre, Maurras, etc., [are] the people who have done most work on this particular aspect of political theory’, and indeed much of what follows is familiar from both Maurras’s thinking and Lasserre’s version of it in Romantisme français.90 However, another influence is now apparent. The articles present a plan for five unwritten articles on politics. The précis and titles that Hulme provides for this unwritten series reveal the renewed influence of Georges Sorel. In the first piece, titled ‘Constancy and Progress’, Hulme proposed to trace the ‘pernicious and disastrous’ influence of modern optimism ‘from the time of Turgot and Condorcet, through Saint Simon, down to its present use by the Socialists’.91 This sketch shows a clear debt to Sorel’s Les Illusions du progrès (1908). It is true that Lasserre had also written on the errors of political optimism, but his discussion retained the Neo-Royalist anticipation of a discernible national progress towards heightened glory, as Louise Williams has shown.92 Sorel’s stoic outlook was less preoccupied with such appreciable gains: if his recommendations contained any hint of ‘progress’ as a possibility, it was in a strengthening of social forces quite apart from human ratiocination or control. This position draws a particularly subtle distinction between two kinds of progress. The former is elusive, unknown to humanity, disconnected to the human condition; but the latter is a fabrication for human consumption, an illusion to direct collective behaviour, a need increasingly common in a period of massified politics.93 The sophistication of Hulme’s proposed treatise points to the advance of Sorel’s influence upon Hulme, something quite distinct from Action française’s input.

122

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Conservatism at the New Age One might see Hulme’s decision to write for The Commentator as a sign of unease with his association with the socialist New Age, but he had no reason to feel unwelcome there. Orage was happily publishing conservative writers like Kennedy, Levy, Ludovici, Chesterton and Belloc and responded enthusiastically to Hulme’s earliest hints of a ‘classical’ worldview. Orage too was impatient with the perceived intellectual laziness of the left. He understood social, like spiritual, evolution to be slow, difficult and mysterious. The facile surrender to one’s impulses that increasingly passed for ‘liberation’ thus held no appeal. As Chesterton later put it, Orage was the first ‘to be emancipated from emancipation’.94 There was no contradiction between his libertarianism and his scorn for the popular mood of ‘progress’.95 As noted, Orage’s ‘Unedited Opinions’ during 1910 record his detachment from such ideas and anticipate a clearer formulation of his pluralist, communitarian sociology. Through late 1911 and 1912, his sympathies with the right came to the fore. As discussed above, Hulme’s first New Age piece with an implicit Tory outlook was his April report from Bologna, in which he asserted that ‘the only kind of progress I like is the progress of princes and troops for they, though they move, make no pretence of moving “upward” ’. He ends the piece by declaring his belief in ‘the classical ideal of the fixed and constant state of man’.96 Orage wrote to Hulme on the day this piece was published, saying ‘[no] better notes on the congress could be written and I am much impressed by their genius’.97 This appears to be the exchange of an intellectual and financial patron with his protégé, but it is notable that Orage was so effusive, considering that Hulme is formulating a basic tenet of his conservatism: ‘the fixed and constant state of man’.98 In fact, their trains of thought were by no means divergent. Through late 1910, Orage had criticized the rhetoric of progress and utopian perfection that had multiplied in popular parlance during the recent political upheaval. In May 1911, a month after Hulme’s trip to Bologna, he published another of his ‘Unedited Opinions’ series, in which he denied the underlying assumption of such ideas: The earth is the home of accident, and in the second, man is a fixed species. That is why perfection is as silly as happiness as a definition of the purpose of life. It is sillier, because it means less […]. There are as good tigers now as when the first was formed; there will never be better men than there have been and are.99

In fact, Orage had been arguing for the fixed nature of humanity as early as 1896, long before Maurras, Lasserre or Sorel’s arguments had become prominent

The Politics of Classicism

123

in France. In such pieces as ‘Towards Socialism’ (1907–1908), we have seen how Orage advocated utopianism while denying that it would ever result in tangible results.100 In fact, this was very close to the spirit of Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence, as we shall see in Chapter 6. The vision of a society achieving equilibrium through a cultivated but unsatisfiable aspiration is typical of this moment and has much in common with Hulme’s ideas, not merely regarding philosophy and politics, but also art and literature.

Catholics and conservatives Alongside Penty, Orage had published various anti-statist thinkers since 1907. Belloc and G. K. Chesterton were perhaps the most influential in the critique of New Liberalism as a combination of state interventionism within a parliamentary system. With their economic argument came an explicitly religious set of values. Belloc, in particular, wrote under the influence of the Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum (1890), which attacked the atomization of liberal free-market democracy.101 This Catholic critique of liberalism developed over several years, but Belloc’s case is best encapsulated in the highly influential texts The Servile State (1912) and The Party System (1913), which respectively took Liberal welfare reforms and the parliamentary system to task. The Servile State was immensely influential, as the Guild Socialist Maurice Reckitt was to recall.102 Villis has recently made the case for grouping Chesterton and Belloc together with Orage, Hulme and other New Age writers as participants in a ‘reactionary avant-garde’. Indeed, their motivations are in many ways alike. Belloc, as Villis has shown, was an admirer of Charles Maurras and drew on his affinities with the Catholic right when criticising British politics.103 Chesterton had undergone a similar evolution towards Catholicism after a youthful spiritual crisis.104 More generally, British Catholic writers had much in common with the Catholic Revival underway in France, as recounted by Richard Griffiths.105 Just as Dreyfusards such as Charles Péguy moved from a passionately held vitalism towards a renewed Catholic faith, so British socialists found they had something in common with the religious ‘orthodoxy’ represented by Chesterton and Belloc. When Orage and his New Age allies echoed Belloc’s case against the Servile State, they also shared in its ethical inflection. As we have seen, Orage very early on talked of ‘fall and redemption’, albeit in relation to his monist worldview. Hulme began to talk of Original Sin in 1912 but had alluded to it during 1911.106 His use of the term suggests a proximity – perhaps a debt – to the

124

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Catholic Revivalism of Péguy and Jacques Maritain.107 While Maurras invoked Catholic doctrine for its social function, Hulme shows signs, over time, of a more serious commitment. The fact that Hulme and Orage, coming from positivist and theosophical background respectively, adopted the moral terminology of the Catholic right is revealing. These thinkers, after a large excursus through modern thought, returned to what looked like religious orthodoxy. Chesterton set down an allegory to capture this process in his work Orthodoxy (1908). A yachtsman setting out to travel the world misreads his map and accidentally ‘discovered England under the impression it was a new island in the South Seas’, mistaking the Brighton Pavilion for a ‘barbaric temple’. Chesterton identifies his own intellectual journey to ‘orthodoxy’ with the yachtsman’s vision of this ‘queer cosmic town’: When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom […] I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.108

This parable is a metaphor for Chesterton’s personal experience of fashionable modern thought, his voyage through a range of philosophical ‘heresies’ towards a renewed orthodoxy. Given Chesterton’s presentation of how he himself had mistakenly sought ‘in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church’, it is no surprise that he appreciated what Orage was trying to do. For Orage, a similar idea was expressed by his phrase ‘brilliant common sense’, by which he referred to an elaborate route through philosophical subtleties to return to core instinctive assumptions.109 Chesterton’s belief that Orage was ‘emancipated from emancipation’ refers to this completion of a circuit through romanticism to a renewed classicism and through the follies of the left to the certainties of the right.110 For a writer like Arthur Penty, one of Orage’s first collaborators, the restoration of the guild system led straightforwardly to an acceptance of Catholic faith.111 Hulme’s friend Ramiro de Maeztu believed that Hulme was close to a conversion at the time of his death at the front in 1917.112 Orage shared something of this trajectory, and both he and Hulme might be compared to participants in the theological modernist movement who, following a period of intellectual experimentation, returned to doctrinal orthodoxy – the most prominent example perhaps being Jacques Maritain.113 Chapter 5 will further consider his references to ‘the fall’ and ‘redemption’. These terms may have been neat tags for

The Politics of Classicism

125

the editor’s complex personal beliefs; but as noted, the tags were neat for a reason. Looking back at the Guild Socialist project years later, in his retrospective article ‘An Editor’s Progress’, it was clear to him that ‘organic societies’ on this model required, above all, the belief in a deity.114

Kennedy and Ludovici It is necessary to distinguish this religious thinking from another kind of conservatism, one hostile to Christian values (but not necessarily Christian institutions), which is commonly, and erroneously, linked to Hulme’s modernism (or sometimes to a generalized ‘New Age’ ideology).115 The New Age from 1908 hosted a group of writers, collaborators on the first English translation of Nietzsche, who took a radical right stance.116 Anthony Ludovici was the translator of Thoughts Out of Season (1909–1910). In 1908, he delivered three lectures at University College London, published under the title Who is to be Master of the World? (1909). The title indicates the tenor of the author’s Nietzscheanism: it was his belief that ‘the strong will and must discharge their strength, and in doing so, the havoc they may make of other beings in their environment is purely incidental’.117 A close colleague and supporter of Ludovici at this time was J. M. Kennedy, also a translator of Nietzsche, who became the foreign correspondent of the New Age and helped formulate the journal’s ethos of ‘classicism’ after 1911. Kennedy called himself a Tory but, like Hulme, was indebted to continental thought. He seems closer to Hulme in some ways, for, as Martin notes, his ‘Tory Democracy’ appeared in the New Age in Spring 1911, months before Hulme’s ‘Tory Philosophy’ series in The Commentator.118 Moreover, his introduction to his survey, English Literature 1880–1905 (1912), draws much the same distinction between schools of literature as Hulme does in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, also dateable to 1912.119 However, Tory Democracy, in particular, contains signals of these writers’ divergence, as Kennedy introduces a racial theory regarding cultural development and treats the British aristocratic tradition as a manifestation of a Nietzschean ‘will to power’ – subjects in which Hulme took little interest.120 These elements connected Kennedy more intimately with Ludovici, his colleague on the Levy translation project. This alliance was reinforced by Kennedy’s enthusiastic reviews of both of Ludovici’s pre-war books.121 Orage invited these writers to contribute to the New Age from 1909.122 At first wary of the journal’s politics, the Levy group gradually became a fixture,

126

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

and their increased prominence has been noted as a distinguishing feature of the New Age’s 1910–1911 volumes. Over time, it was Kennedy who was most willing to reciprocate Orage’s interest, in a spate of New Age articles that gestured at overlaps between ‘Tory’ and Guild Socialist notions of the ‘organic society’.123 However, despite his hospitality, Orage remained ambivalent. He made his reservations known in a review of Kennedy’s book The Quintessence of Nietzsche (1909), in which he distinguished between a reading of Nietzsche as an exponent of ‘fictions’ and a reading of Nietzsche as a conservative. Ludovici and Kennedy, Orage notes, began by admitting Nietzsche’s attack on ‘truth’, yet still rapidly moved on to a reductive and essentialist reading of his ethical strictures.124 The most glaring case in point is their treatment of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Orage read this as an allegory, unrelated to real social phenomena.125 For his part, Ludovici, despite recognizing Nietzsche’s attack on metaphysical essences, took his ‘transvaluation of morality’ on face value and sought an elite founded on brute force.126 In contrast, Hulme’s notebooks, from very early on, bring him closer to Orage’s reading of Nietzsche, and this becomes explicit in ‘The New Philosophy’ (1909), in which he emphasized that the roots of Nietzsche’s ideas lay in his ‘metaphysics’.127 The essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’ of course comes to mind, as do many passages from The Twilight of the Idols.128 A ‘radical attack’ on Kantian Idealism was, wrote Hulme, by far the most important dimension of Nietzsche’s work, overlooked by dull accounts of his debts to earlier thinkers provided by ‘young Italians’ – a clear reference to Ludovici’s 1908 lectures. Ludovici’s error, Hulme insists, was to dwell on Nietzsche’s place in the history of philosophy, overlooking the most important point that he had to make, which was that there could be no epistemological certainty.129 In overlooking this, Ludovici became a devotee of that part of Nietzsche’s work that Hulme found most unappealing. It is in the reconstruction of morality that, as Orage observed, Ludovici lapses into essentialism. His criteria for the new elite include terms like ‘health’, ‘vigour’ and ‘purity’ all of which he attributes to a new ‘ruler class’ (his own place in which is taken as read). This marks a slippage from relativism into authoritarianism.130 In 1912, Hulme correspondingly attacked the ‘romantic nonsense of the two kinds of morality’.131 Where Orage and Hulme saw Nietzsche as challenging truth at a foundational level, and thus as a proponent of pragmatism, Ludovici saw his ‘transvaluation of values’ as a license to impose his own truth through force. In his first U.C.L. lecture, Ludovici’s account of the history of philosophy registered the movement from pagan classic values, through the rise of

The Politics of Classicism

127

Christianity and scholasticism, through to the Renaissance, and then to the deadening effect of the Reformation. He quotes Nietzsche directly to point out the glory of Renaissance humanism and the rediscovery of classical virtue, and to blame the Reformation – and in particular German culture – for the suppression of this idea by Lutheran Protestantism. In making this case, Ludovici emphasizes the suppressive effect of the doctrine of Peccatum Originale or Original Sin.132 In the Quintessence of Nietzsche, Kennedy’s treatment of religion is very similar. He distinguishes between Northern and Southern Christianity and between Protestantism and Catholicism. The former is dismissed as the origin of modern liberalism, crediting the individual with responsibility for their salvation, and beginning the trend towards social atomisation. The latter is of greater interest, not for its dogma, but for the glory of the medieval social structure that it had once underpinned. Kennedy believes that this edifice was a product as much of a pagan impulse as theological one: it was the will to power, in essence, which made the Church a dominant social force. The noble values of paganism are what make Catholicism appealing.133 Kennedy’s ability to assimilate Christian values to a Nietzschean worldview explains the apparent convergence of his thought with Hulme’s and Orage’s in 1911. Shortly after Hulme and Orage had both referred to ‘the constant state of man’, J. M. Kennedy published his series of articles ‘Tory Democracy’, later collected in a book of that title. He begins with a condensed history of political thought tracing the rise of liberalism from Protestantism and the idea that every man is his own priest and is capable of redemption. Denouncing this view, he favours one, tellingly, of ‘man in his fixed and permanent state’.134 However, this contribution to the New Age’s ‘classicism’ has to be treated with some care. While voicing support for British Tory tradition in the Disraeli/ Churchill tradition, Kennedy was also close to Ludovici’s extremist point of view and had elsewhere also denounced the concept of ‘Original Sin’ as obstructing the emergence of the Übermenschen.135 Kennedy, in his glowing review of Ludovici’s first book, aligned himself with a distinct notion of classicism deriving from a slanted reading of Nietzsche: Ludovici was much concerned with classical virtue: health, strength and self-discipline, attributes of an elite, including Ludovici himself, who deserve to rule.136 Hulme took the view, as we have noted, that humans are frail, fallible creatures: children of God. If we need discipline, it is not in the interests of a few individuals’ glory, but to save us from ourselves.137 Again, we see the essential clash between the religious ethic behind Orage and Hulme’s position and the pagan elitism of the radical right Nietzscheans.

128

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Kennedy’s attempts to find common ground between his brand of ‘Tory Democracy’ and Guild Socialism broke down in October 1913, when he rejected the notion of workers’ self-government in an article for the Nineteenth Century and was subsequently denounced in a letter to the New Age signed by the ‘Writers of the articles on the National Guilds’ (a pseudonym used by both S. G. Hobson and Orage).138 Within weeks of this falling-out, Hulme and Orage joined, from slightly different positions, in attacking Ludovici’s Nietzschean theory of ‘aristocratic’ art, as we shall see in the next chapter. The complex relations sketched here, not only between Hulme’s, Kennedy’s and Ludovici’s readings of Nietzsche, but also between Bergsonism and Maurrasianism, between vitalism and classicism and between Oragean socialism and Hulmean Toryism, would all play a part in shaping the debate about modern art in 1914, the subject of the next chapter.

Notes ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, CW, pp. 58–73; ‘A Tory Philosophy I-V’, The Commentator, 4 (3 April 1912); 4 (10 April 1912), 310; 4 (1 May 1912); 362; (8 May 1912), 380; (15 May 1912), 388–89. CW, pp. 232–45. 2 ‘A Tory Philosophy I’, p. 310; CW, p. 232. 3 See Martin, ‘New Age’ Under Orage, p. 127; Csengeri, ‘Intellectual Development’, p. 7; ‘Introduction’, CW, p. xi; Levenson, Genealogy, p. 89. 4 Rae, Practical Muse, p. 46. 5 ‘A Tory Philosophy I’, p. 295; CW, p. 234. 6 For examples, see ‘Cinders’, CW, pp. 10–11, 12, 16, 19, 21, 22; ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, CW, pp. 49, 51. His four 1909 articles all illustrate the point to some degree, particularly ‘Searchers After Reality III’, pp. 107–08; CW, pp. 99–103. 7 Rae, Practical Muse, p. 46. 8 See Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), for a standard history. 9 He first mentions them in ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion I’, The Commentator, 2 (22 February 1911), p. 234; repr. in CW, pp. 207–08. 10 See Martin, ‘New Age’ Under Orage, pp. 172, 213; Csengeri, ‘Intellectual Development’, pp. 13–15; and ‘Introduction’, CW, pp. xviii–xxi. The point is made most strongly by Levenson in Genealogy, pp. 82–88. 11 ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’, NA, 8.26 (27 April 1911), 607–08 (p. 608); CW, 104–09 (p. 108). 12 Maurras and Lasserre represented, in Hulme’s view, ‘a very precise and lucid AntiRomanticism’. Ontario, McMaster University Library Archives, Ogden Papers, Box 108 F.2, Letter from Hulme to C. K. Ogden, 27 November 1912. 1

The Politics of Classicism

129

13 Hull History Centre, Hulme Papers, DHU5e, ‘T. E. Hulme’, typescript memoir written for Alun Jones, 3 February 1956, p. 4. Louise Williams is one of the few critics to contrast Hulme’s cyclical notion of history with Maurras and Lasserre’s progressive one in ‘British Modernism, History, and Totalitarianism: The Case of T. E. Hulme’, CLIO, 23.3 (Spring 1994), 257–69; and in Modernism and the Ideology of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 92–97. 14 For more on Action française, see René Rémond, The Right Wing in France (1954; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), pp. 233–53; Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), pp. 29–141; Samuel Osgood, French Royalism under the Third and Fourth Republics (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 54–136; Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); Edward R. Tannenbaum, The Action Française: Die-hard Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century France (New York: John Wiley, 1962); and Paul Mazgaj, Action Française and Revolutionary Syndicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 15 ‘Cinders’, CW, p. 10. See Patricia Rae, ‘Imagism and Bovarysme’, pp. 26–42; Practical Muse, pp. 64–71. 16 Ontario, McMaster University Library Archives, Ogden Papers, Box 108 F.2, Letter from Hulme to C. K. Ogden, 27 November 1912. 17 For an account of the Lords crisis, see Dangerfield, Strange Death, pp. 3–64. For Hulme’s opposition to the Lords reform, see ‘On Progress and Democracy I-II’, The Commentator, 3 (2 August 1911), 165–66; (9 August 1911), 179–80; CW, pp. 219–25. 18 Hulme recalls reading Action française’s activities in 1910 in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, CW, p. 60. 19 Hulme’s discussion of the ‘history of […] words [in] three stages’ occurs in ‘A Tory Philosophy I’, p. 295; CW, p. 234. At first, ‘a word has a definite and precise meaning’; later, it has ‘about a dozen meanings’, and ‘is dangerous and should be left alone’. Lastly, ‘it has three hundred meanings’, and is ‘once again useful and innocuous’. 20 Rae, ‘Hulme’s French Sources’, p. 91; Practical Muse, p. 48. As Rae argues, critics such as Kermode, ‘who have accused Hulme of inconsistencies in his theory of “romanticism” and “classicism” ’ have mistakenly ‘assumed he applied the terms in the widest sense’, Practical Muse, pp. 48–49; Rae, ‘Hulme’s French Sources’, pp. 69–71. 21 René Wellek, ‘French “Classical Criticism” in the Twentieth Century’, Yale French Studies, 38 (1967), 47–71. 22 Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 16–38; James D. Herbert, Fauve Painting: The Making of the Cultural Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 112–45; David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and

130

23

24 25 26

27

28

29 30

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism Politics in Paris 1905–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 55–73. See Kenneth Silver’s, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989); and Laura Morowitz, ‘Medievalism, Classicism, and Nationalism: The Appropriation of the French Primitifs in Turn-of-the-Century France’; Neil McWilliam, ‘Action Française, Classicism, and the Dilemmas of Traditionalism in France, 1900-1914’; and Gaetano DeLeonibus, ‘The Quarrel over Classicism: A Quest for Uniqueness’; all in Nationalism and French Visual Culture 1870–1914, ed. by June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 225–42, 269–91, 293–306, respectively. More formal, rather than ideological, treatments of ‘classicism’ in the graphic arts can be found in On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico, and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 [exh.cat. Tate Gallery], (London 1990), Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music 1914–1935 [exh.cat. Kunstmuseum, Basel]; From Puvis de Chavannes to Picasso and Matisse [exh. cat. Palazzo Grassi], (London 2002). McWilliam, ‘Action Française’, p. 269. Quoted in J. S. McClelland. ed., The French Right (From de Maistre to Maurras) (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 37–59, 61–83. See Isaiah Berlin, ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. by Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990), pp. 94–174; and McClelland, The French Right, pp. 91–174 (pp. 92–93, 98, 114–15, 167). Charles Maurras, ‘Idées françaises ou idées suisses’, L’Action française, I (1899), 307–27, reworked as the preface to his 1922 collection Romantisme et révolution, which included L’Avenir de l’intelligence and Trois idées politiques. Charles Maurras, ‘Préface de L’Édition définitive’ (Paris: Nouvelle Librarie Nationale, 1922), pp. 1–24. See Michael Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 46–75 for a discussion of Maurras’s most influential pre-war writings. Pierre Lasserre, Le Romantisme français: Essai sur la Révolution dans les sentiments et dans les idées au XIXe siècle (Paris: Mercure de France, 1907), pp. 9–76. La Morale du Nietzsche (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902), pp. 17, 33, 64–68, 71–73, 133–36. See Grogin, Bergsonian Controversy, pp. 107–96; Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 3–15. Maurras talked of ‘the Scottish Jew who is not even a thorough student of Aristotle and St Thomas’. See Henry Bordeaux, Charles Maurras et L’Action française (Paris: Plon, 1955), quoted by Ellen Kennedy, ‘Bergson’s Philosophy and French Political Doctrines: Sorel, Maurras, Péguy and de Gaulle’, Government and Opposition, 15 (1980), 75–91 (81). Michael Curtis, Three Against the Republic: Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 61. For accounts of this

The Politics of Classicism

131

anti-Semitic campaign, see also Grogin, Bergsonian Controversy, pp. 184–92, and Antliff, Inventing Bergson, p. 18. Pierre Lasserre made the case most famously in his ‘La Philosophie de M. Bergson’, L’Action française Mensuelle, 246 (15 March 1911), 165–83. 31 ‘Spiritualist’ applies here both in the French sense, referring to an idealist form of psychology or philosophy; and in the wider sense, meaning forms of occult or theosophical thought. 32 For accounts of the pre-war confluence of left and right, see Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire, 1885-1914: les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978); Eugen Weber, ‘France’, in The European Right, ed. by Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 71–127; and Mazgaj, Action Française and Revolutionary Syndicalism. 33 For more on these individuals, see Weber, Action Française, pp. 73–74, 76–82; Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri , The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton, 1994), pp. 86–89, 93–96, 123–27; Mazgaj, Action Française and Revolutionary Syndicalism, and Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 7–8, 9, 11, 158, 178–80, 184. For more on Valois, perhaps the closest to Hulme in profile, and equally as complex politically, see Allen Douglas, From Fascism to Libertarian Communism: George Valois Against the Third Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 34 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. by David Maisel (1983; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 8–11, 90–97, recounts the formation of this group. Sorel encouraged the syndicalist Édouard Berth and the Neo-Royalist Georges Valois to work together. In March 1911, Henri Lagrange, a leading figure in the Camelots du Roi, suggested to Valois that they found an economic and social study group for nationalists. Valois described the aim of the group as to provide ‘a common platform for nationalists and leftist anti-democrats’ (p. 11). Zeev Sternhell directly links Hulme to the Cercle Proudhon in ‘Epilogue: From a Cultural Rebellion to a Political Revolution’, in The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; repr. 1994), pp. 233–59 (pp. 238–42). 35 Weber, Action Française, p. 82. 36 McWilliam, ‘Action Française, Classicism’, pp. 274–75, 275–76. 37 Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 16–38, 39–66, 106–134. Antliff and Leighten, Cubism and Culture, pp. 111–18, 121. 38 Charles Harrison and Paul Wood make this point in a note on Denis in Art in Theory 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 47. See also pp. 14–16, 217–22. 39 Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 37, 126, 129. Weber, Action Française, p. 77. 40 Antliff, Inventing Bergson, p. 37. See also Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 34.

132

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

41 Although La Cité francaise, never appeared in print, a statement of intent, Déclaration de la Cité francaise, signed by Sorel, Valois, Berth, Jean Variot and Pierre Gilbert was circulated. L’Independance (1911–1913) became an important venue for writers involved with or close to the Cercle Proudhon and its Sorelian cultural politics. These writers drew on Maurras’s classicist revival but, defying his strictures, retained an interest in Bergson and vitalism; the synthesis led them to Sorel. Among them were promoters of avant-garde art and literature such as Maurice Denis and Tancrède de Visan. See Mark Antliff, ‘Georges Sorel and the Anti-Enlightenment: Art, Politics, Ideology’, Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870-1914: A Symposium, ed. by June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 307–32; ‘The Jew as Anti-Artist: Georges Sorel and the Aesthetics of Anti-Enlightenment’, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilisation of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 63–101. See also Antliff and Leighten, Cubism and Culture, pp. 10, 111–18, 121, 127. 42 For the activities of the Camelots du Roi, see Weber, Action Française, pp. 35, 43, 53–57, 64–65, 83–84, 139, 366–67; Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, pp. 69–72, 90–93, 98; Osgood, French Royalism, pp. 81–94, 100–05. Recounting the Action française disturbances of 1910, Hulme exclaims: ‘That is what I call a real vital interest in literature’. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, CW, pp. 59–73 (p. 60). 43 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (1895), trans. unknown (London: T.F. Unwin, 1903), pp. 133–59. 44 Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Constable, 1908), pp. 98–113, 114–37, 138–66. 45 ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion II’, p. 250; CW, pp. 208, 209. 46 ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion III’, p. 266; CW, pp. 210–13 (pp. 210, 211). 47 Hulme, ‘Notes on Language and Style’, CW, p. 28. 48 Martin, ‘Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic’, p. 199. 49 See Leo Weinstein, Hippolyte Taine (New York: Twayne, 1972), p. 66, and John Burrow, A History of Histories (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 396–404; Taine draws these connections in Les Origines de la France contemporaine, 6 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1876, I: L’Ancien Régime and IV, La Révolution. Translated by John Durand as The Origins of Contemporary France, 6 vols. London: Daldy, Isbister, 1878–1885, III The Ancient Régime (1888) and IV The French Revolution (1878). 50 Maurras commented ‘L’erreur de Taine nous confond! […] Où Taine a cru voir des affinités s’était donc dessinée une répulsion logique et constante. ‘Préface de L’Édition définitive’, pp. 2, 5. Translated by McClelland as ‘Taine’s error astounds us! […] Where [he] saw affinity, there was therefore but contradiction’. French Right, pp. 240, 242. 51 For a full account of Le Bon and his debt to Taine, see Robert Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London: Sage, 1975).

The Politics of Classicism

133

52 ‘The Art of Political Conversion’, p. 358; CW, pp. 214–18 (p. 216). Compare to the ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, p. 55; and ‘Searchers After Reality II: Haldane’, pp. 315–16; CW, p. 95. 53 [Thomas Gratton], ‘The Art of Political Conversion’, The Commentator, 2 (19 April 1911), 357–58; repr. in CW, pp. 214–18 (p. 216). 54 Ibid., p. 216. 55 ‘Searchers after Reality III’, p. 103. 56 ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’, p. 608; CW, p. 108. 57 For example, Csengeri writes of how Hulme ‘finally … reject[ed] Bergson’ in ‘Introduction’, CW p. xx. 58 Weber, Action Française, pp. 68–88 (pp. 75, 80). 59 Hulme mentions his visit to Gaultier in a letter of December 1912 to Ogden (McMaster Library Collection); he mentions his visit to Lasserre in ‘Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’, p. 40; CW, pp. 164–65. 60 ‘Searchers after Reality: Jules de Gaultier’, p. 108; CW, p. 101. 61 ‘Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’, NA, 10.2 (9 November 1911), 38–40 (40); CW, pp. 164, 165. 62 Lasserre made the racial case in his lecture series at the Institut de Action francaise just weeks before he met Hulme, later reprinted in ‘La Philosophie de M. Bergson’. This remains a subtext to his conversation with Hulme as reported in ‘Balfour, Bergson and Politics’, although it not made explicit. 63 ‘Balfour, Bergson and Politics’, 40; CW, p. 165. 64 ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’, p. 607–8; CW, pp. 108–9. 65 F. C. S. Schiller refers to Papini in ‘Another Congress of Philosophers’, The Pelican Record, 10 (June 1911), 183–85 (184). For the corridor metaphor, see Giovanni Papini, ‘Pragmatismo messo in ordine’, Leonardo, 3.2 (April 1905), 45–48 (47). James quotes Papini in Pragmatism, pp. 22–23; Hulme cites Prezzolini in ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion I’, The Commentator, 2 (22 February 1911), 234, misspelling his name ‘Pezzolini’. 66 Hulme cites Prezzolini in ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion I’, The Commentator, 2 (22 February 1911), 234, misspelling his name ‘Pezzolini’. 67 For an account of the Florentines’ fascist links, see Walter Adamson, AvantGarde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 68 This idea originated in Prezzolini’s essay ‘L’Uomo-Dio’, Leonardo, 1 (March 1903), pp. 3–4 and was elaborated three years later the final pages of Papini’s Il Crepuscolo dei filosofi (1907), and in a longer article ‘Dall’uomo a dio’ (Leonardo, 4.1 (Feb 1906), pp. 6–15). 69 Adrian Lyttleton, ‘Introduction’, Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile, ed. by Adrian Lyttleton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), pp. 11–36 (pp. 11–12).

134

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

70 ‘On Progress and Democracy I’, The Commentator, 3 (2 August 1911), 165–66; repr. in CW, pp. 219–22 (p. 221). 71 ‘[T]his conception of a continuous French rational tradition is a very conventional and shallow one. You cannot label races in this way.’ ‘Bergsonism in Paris’, NA, 9.8 (22 June 1911), 189–90 (p. 190). 72 Lasserre, ‘La Philosophie de M. Bergson’, p. 182. Hulme’s contemporaries, for example Edward Marsh, noted his derision of racial theories (Keele University Archives, Hulme Collection, HUL 53, Edward Marsh to Michael Roberts, 4 November 1937). Ashley Dukes, though confident that ‘Hulme, had he lived, would have embraced some form of fascism’, similarly noted the absence of any anti-semitic element to his conversation (Ashley Dukes, The Scene is Changed (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 41). 73 See Russell Grenon, ‘Tancrede de Visan, An Intellectual Biography’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 1957). 74 Tancrède de Visan, L’Attitude du lyrisme contemporain (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911). Reviewed by Hulme in NA, 9.17 (24 August 1911), 400–01; CW, pp. 57–58. 75 Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 10, 18, 23–31. 76 Ibid., pp. 23–31. 77 ‘Bax on Bergson’, NA, 9.14 (3 August 1911), 328–31; repr. in CW, pp. 116–124, Hulme expresses worries over Bergson’s celebrity. In ‘Bergson Lecturing,’ NA, 10.1 (2 November 1911), 15–16; repr. in CW, pp. 154–59, he describes his reaction to the lecture audience. There is no space here to do justice to the complicated gender politics involved in this piece, or Hulme’s perplexed admission of his own ‘childish’ irrationalism. 78 ‘Bergson Lecturing’, p. 158. 79 ‘Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’, NA, 10.2 (9 November 1911); repr. in CW, pp. 160–65. 80 Five ‘Notes on Bergson’, appeared in the NA between October 1911 and February 1912. CW, pp. 125–53. Hulme lectured at the home of Mrs Franz Liebich between 23 November and 14 December 1914, as advertised in the NA, 9.26 (26 October 1911), 623. 81 The lecture notes later entitled ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’ were first published in Speculations (1924), repr. in CW, pp. 170–90. Another set of notes, entitled ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ were first published posthumously as ‘The Notebooks of T. E. Hulme’, NA, 30 (30 March 1922), 287–88; (6 April 1922) 301–02; and (13 April 1922) 310–12. Repr. CW, pp. 191–204. See Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 107, for an account of their impact on Pound and Imagism. 82 See Carr, Verse Revolutionaries, for a detailed history of Imagism. 83 F. S. Flint, ‘Contemporary French Poetry’, Poetry Review Special Number 1.8 (August 1912), 352.

The Politics of Classicism

135

84 Ezra Pound, ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris II’, NA, 10.6 (7 December 1911), 130–31; Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1973), pp. 21–24; and ‘Prolegomena’, Poetry Review I (1912), pp. 72–76; Literary Essays (London: Faber, 1954), p. 12. 85 For an account of the psychological sources of Pound’s 1913 Imagist manifesto, see Carr, Verse Revolutionaries, pp. 541–42. See Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism on Pound’s Neoplatonism. 86 See Carr, Verse Revolutionaries, pp. 765–74 for a detailed account of this controversy. 87 T. E. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, CW, pp. 59–73. 88 See Rae, Practical Muse, pp. 47–50. 89 ‘A Tory Philosophy I-V’, The Commentator, 4 (3 April 1912), 294–95; 4 (10 April 1912), 310; 4 (1 May 1912), 362; 4 (8 May 1912), 380; 4 (15 May 1912), 388–89; CW, pp. 233–45. 90 ‘A Tory Philosophy I’, p. 295; CW, p. 234. 91 ‘A Tory Philosophy III’, p. 362; CW, p. 239. 92 Louise B. Williams, ‘British Modernism, History, and Totalitarianism: The Case of T. E. Hulme’, CLIO, 23.3 (1994) , 257–69; Modernism and the Ideology of History, pp. 91–113. 93 Georges Sorel, Les Illusions du progrès (Paris, Marcel Rivière, 1908). 94 G. K. Chesterton, ‘Orage: Memories’, New English Weekly, 6.5 (15 November 1934), 97–100 (99); repr. as ‘Introduction’ to Mairet, A.R. Orage, pp. v–viii (p. vi). 95 See ‘Unedited Opinions I: On Progress’, NA, 8.4 (24 November 1910), 84. 96 ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’, p. 608; CW, p. 108. 97 Quoted in Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, pp. 89, 282, n.12. The letter is in Paul Hulme’s archive. 98 ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’, p. 608; CW, p. 108. 99 Orage, ‘Unedited Opinions: The Government of the Mind’, NA, 9 (27 July 1911), 299. 100 For example, in his remark that ‘the game of life must not only be played but if it is to be played it must be played seriously; and to be played seriously it must be played for high stakes, even though the receipt or forfeiture are purely imaginary’ (‘Towards Socialism VI: The Meaning of Liberty’, NA, 2.2 (7 November 1907), 29). 101 See Jay Corrin, G. K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), pp. 1–46, 49, 78–80, 81, 84–87, 98; see also Corrin’s Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 102 Maurice Reckitt, As It Happened (London: J.M. Dent, 1941), pp. 107–08, 113. 103 Villis, Reaction and the Avant-Garde, pp. 6–7, 15–16, 73, 136, 138. 104 William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 89–91. 105 Richard Griffiths’ The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature. (1870–1914) (London: Constable, 1966).

136

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

106 Hulme’s first reference to Original Sin seems to have come in his lecture to the Heretics Society in Cambridge in January 1912, the text of which has not survived. However, the doctrine is implicit in his work as early as April 1911, for example in a reference to the ‘fixed and constant nature of man’ in his ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’, p. 608; CW, p. 108. 107 On Péguy and Maritain, see Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution, pp. 21–42, 54–68. 108 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1908), pp. 12–15, 17–18. 109 The phrase is used in the New Age from 1913 onwards. It is best explained by Orage, in ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 17.6 (10 June 1915), 133. 110 Chesterton, ‘Orage: Memories’, p. 99; repr. as ‘Introduction’ to Mairet, A.R. Orage, p. vi. For a comparative study of Chesterton and Orage, arguing that the former influenced the latter’s ethical thinking, see John Coates, ‘The Case of Orage’, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull: Hull University Press, 1985), pp. 233–45. 111 See Edward J. Kiernan, Arthur J. Penty: His Contribution to Social Thought (unpublished doctoral thesis, Catholic University of America, 1941) for a full account of Penty’s thinking. 112 Hull History Centre, Hulme Collection, DHU 3, letter from Ramiro de Maeztu to Kate Lechmere, 28 April 1918. Quoted by Jones, Life and Opinions, p. 142. 113 For more on Catholic and Anglican Modernism, see Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity, Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion, Suzanne Hobson, ‘Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism in G.K. Chesterton and Allen Upward’, in Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, pp. 67–79. For a view of Hulme in relation to Catholic Modernism, see my ‘Modernist Anti-Modernists’. 114 Orage asks what factor would have brought citizens together in a commitment to Social Credit, to which he offers the answer ‘quite simply, God […]. There can be no religion in the absence of God, though there may be God in the absence of religion! Religion I venture to define as the attempt to establish an ideal and conscious relation between man and God’. ‘Editor’s Progress IV: The Quest for God’, The Commonweal, 3 (3 March 1926), 456–57 (457); repr. in NA, 38.25 (22 April 1926), 295–96 (296). 115 See in particular Alan Robinson, Poetry, Painting and Ideas (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 107–08; and Villis, Reaction and the Avant-Garde, p. 54. 116 The history of the translation project was recounted by Levy’s ‘The Nietzsche Movement in England’, first published in three parts in the NA, 12.7 (19 December 1912), 157–58; 12.8 (26 December 1912), 181–83; 12.9 (2 January 1913), 204–06; repr. in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 18 vols (London & Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909–1913), XVIII: Index to the Complete Works (1913), p. xvii. See Dan Stone’s study of Levy’s group of translators in Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race, and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002). Particularly useful on Levy’s complex, racially oriented

The Politics of Classicism

137

reading of Nietzsche (pp. 12–32) and Ludovici’s later, increasingly fascistic, writing (pp. 33–61), it gives less consideration to Ludovici and Kennedy’s pre-war positioning within the New Age, which is my focus here. 117 Anthony Ludovici, Who is to be Master of the World? (London & Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1909), p. 43. 118 Martin, ‘New Age’ under Orage, p. 219; J. M. Kennedy, ‘Tory Democracy’, NA, 9.1 (4 May 1911), 7–9; 9.3 (18 May 1911), 54; 9.5 (1 June 1911), 100; 9.7 (15 June 1911), 148–49; 9.9 (29 June 1911), 197; 9.11 (13 July 1911), 244–45; 9.13 (27 July 1911), 292; 9.14 (3 August 1911), 320; 9.15 (10 August 1911), 341–42. J. M. Kennedy, Tory Democracy (London: Stephen Swift, 1911). 119 J. M. Kennedy, English Literature 1880–1905 (London: Stephen Swift, 1912), pp. 1–27, esp. pp. 25–26. 120 Kennedy, Tory Democracy, pp. 21–22. 121 J. M. Kennedy, ‘The Book of the Week [Who Is To Be the Master of the World?]’, NA, 4.10 (31 December 1908), 208–08; J. M. K[ennedy], [Review of] ‘Nietzsche and Art. By A. M. Ludovici’, NA, 9.15 (10 August 1911), 350–51. 122 It seems Orage cultivated Ludovici as a contributor; the latter recalled, on their first meeting, discussing Plato and Nietzsche with him in a Gower Street tea shop during his first lecture series at U.C.L. See Ludovici’s ‘obituary letter’ to the New English Weekly, 6.5 (15 November 1934), 115. Orage may have made Kennedy’s acquaintance through the Levy group, whom he was courting collectively. Mysterious circumstances surrounded Kennedy’s appointment as Orage’s foreign correspondent, following the Foreign Office’s protests regarding the New Age’s somewhat seditious interventions in the Ferrer affair. Rumours later circulated that he was working for the British secret service. Villis, Reaction and the AvantGarde, p. 10 123 ‘We Tories feel that we have much more in common with the Socialists than with the Liberals’, J. M. Kennedy, ‘ “New Age” Policy’, NA, 7.11 (14 July 1910), 261–61; see also ‘Some Tory Policies’, NA, 9.20 (14 September 1911), 460–61. ‘Notes on the Present Kalpa VI - Hierarchy, cont’, NA, 12.9 (2 January 1913), 201. 124 A. R. Orage, ‘Nietzsche: The Lyrical Bismarck’, NA, 6.13 (27 January 1910), 304. 125 Orage, Nietzsche The Dionysian Spirit of the Age, pp. 51–54. 126 Ludovici, Who is to be Master of the World?, p. 43. 127 ‘The New Philosophy’, p. 198; CW, p. 86. 128 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘How the Real World Became a Myth’, The Twilight of the Idols or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and The Antichrist (1888), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968; repr. rev. edn, 2003), pp. 50–51. 129 ‘The New Philosophy’, p. 198; CW, p. 86. 130 Orage, ‘Nietzsche: The Lyrical Bismarck’, NA, 6.13 (27 January 1910), 304. 131 ‘A Tory Philosophy I’, p. 295; CW, p. 235.

138

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

132 Ludovici, Who Is To Be Master of the World?, pp. 19–31, esp. pp. 20, 23. 133 Kennedy, The Quintessence of Nietzsche (London: T.W. Laurie, 1909), pp. 64–80, esp. pp. 75–76. 134 J. M. Kennedy, ‘Tory Democracy’, NA, 9 (29 June 1911), 197. 135 Kennedy, The Quintessence of Nietzsche, p. 67. The tone of the introductory chapters on religion and politics, pp. 51–72, 73–105 prompted Orage’s critical review, NA, 6.13 (27 January 1910), 304. 136 J.M. Kennedy, ‘The Book of the Week [Who Is To Be the Master of the World?]’, NA, 4.10 (31 December 1908), 208–08. 137 ‘Tory Philosophy III’, Commentator, 4 (8 May 1912), 380; CW, pp. 240–41; ‘On Progress and Democracy I’, pp. 165–66; CW, pp. 220–22. 138 The ‘Writers of the Articles on the National Guilds’ wrote to object in ‘Mr. J. M. Kennedy on the National Guild System’ [Letter], NA, 13.25 (16 October 1913). Kennedy replied the following week, NA, 13.26 (23 October 1913), 772, and the debate continued in NA, 13.27 (30 October 1913), 800; and NA, 14.3 (20 November 1913), 91. Orage proposed that Nietzsche’s ideas supported the Guild principle in ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 14.12 (22 January 1914), 370, leading to a dispute with Ludovici in February 1914. See Chapter 5.

4

Varieties of Abstraction

Any survey of Hulme’s thinking after 1911 remains incomplete without consideration of a key event in London at the beginning of that period. Roger Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition (November 1910 to January 1911) marked the belated public reception in Britain of modern French art, which, under the influence of Cézanne and his disciples, was moving towards forms of abstraction.1 This art, some of it dating back to the 1880s, acquired an ideological significance for the pre-war Parisian avant-garde, whose cultural politics Hulme knew well. However, his references to the visual arts before 1911 were limited, and he made no reference to the latest work in France before Fry had publicized it in London.2 At some point, he attended the first PostImpressionist exhibition, which included works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Vlaminck and Derain. Although he did not comment until several months later, the impact on his work was clear.3 Hulme began to see how the new art could illustrate philosophical ideas he had developed over the previous few years. But Fry’s presentation did not always do these ideas justice. As younger artists, under the influence of Futurism and Cubism, began to challenge Fry’s version of modernism, seeking more extreme forms of abstraction, Hulme lent them theoretical support.4 He began to write about the visual arts in late 1911 and, from Christmas 1913 through to July 1914, concentrated entirely on this subject. His analysis of divergent movements within Post-Impressionism was remarkably penetrating, and the resulting eight articles and lecture remain important texts in modern British art history.5 This chapter continues the project of drawing what Hulme saw as a ‘complicated line’ marking his particular position within an increasingly divided avant-garde, this time as art critic.6 In Levenson’s influential account, this phase of Hulme’s work involves another about-turn, as Hulme espouses ‘abstraction’ and rejects the ‘classic’.7 His new emphasis on stripping living things of their ‘messy’ detail and reducing them to mechanical forms seems to run contrary to his earlier calls for

140

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

qualities of tangibility and physical specificity in poetry, and the identification of that style with ‘classicism’ from 1911 to 1912. However, there is some confusion here regarding different usages of these terms at different times. As Csengeri has pointed out, Levenson reads too much into the term ‘classical’, by which Hulme in this context means the mimetic tradition.8 Hulme’s appreciation of ‘abstraction’, once his use of that term is unpacked, is consistent with his poetry’s seizure of fixed moments out of the flux of consciousness. Similarly, there are continuities linking Hulme’s definition of ‘classicism’ in July 1912 and his art criticism running from December 1913 to July the following year, a connection more understandable if we look to the convergence of Maurrasian or Sorelian rhetoric and artistic abstraction in France. The most significant new element to his thinking is Wilhelm Worringer’s theory of art, but I want to add weight to the idea that Hulme’s Worringerian antitheses of this period – ‘abstraction’ versus ‘empathy’, ‘humanism’ versus ‘the religious attitude’ – refer broadly to the same ideas he earlier termed ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’. These ideas are amplified during 1914 as Hulme presents modern art as signalling the emergence of a new sensibility in culture and society. We have seen Hulme as a relativist who wished for absolutes, and this tension is manifested from 1913 to 1914 in several ways: first, in his promotion of artworks that illustrated, in their combination of organic and abstract forms, this effort to impose order on a contingent world; second, in his pursuit of fresh, exact terminology to describe this art; and third, in the battle to classify various artists, for example, as ‘Post-Impressionist’, ‘Futurist’, ‘Cubist’, ‘NeoRealist’ or ‘Vorticist’ – a struggle to give generic ideas ‘definite meaning’. These overlapping concerns indicate how Hulme’s interest in visual abstraction stems from the same preoccupations as his philosophical and literary writings. An avowed ‘pluralist’, he wished to show how truths often taken for granted were arbitrary fictions, but, as a pragmatist, he also sought a deliberate construction of a new moral order.9 A wish to expose chaos evolves into a yearning for new certainties. In poetry, metaphor satisfied both impulses – its clash of images disrupted old classifications but at the same time proposed new ones. Visual art, in his view, was prone to cliché too. Anticipating modern accounts of semiotics in art, Hulme implies that the relation between painting and the thing depicted is analogous to the tension between ‘vehicle’ and ‘tenor’ in metaphor. This idea occurs in Hulme’s 1911 essay ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ but remains implicit in his reading of Worringer.10 The latter proposed that modern conventions had hardened, in the depiction of landscapes, portraits or nudes, the execution of which was appraised naively on mimetic criteria. In fact, Hulme argued,

Varieties of Abstraction

141

they expressed the humanist assumption that the world was a habitable and controllable environment. The curving, empathetic lines and warm colours of naturalism were cosy and unquestioned clichés.11 The abstraction Hulme sought in art was not absolute, departing from nature, but, drawing attention to conventional art’s disconnectedness from raw sense data, it refreshed a sense of this cindery source material. At the same time, however, it introduced a new and deliberate stylization. Abstraction conveyed humanity’s collective fear and awe in the face of an incomprehensible universe. The art that Hulme championed in 1914 reflected a desire for absolutes while keeping in view the troublingly messy sensory realm that was its spur. Across a spectrum of artistic formalism interesting to Hulme, there was a common desire to impose order upon the contingent, to freeze, to fix and to analyse, ranging from Sickert’s detection of aesthetic form within the chaos of modern life to David Bomberg’s far more accentuated but similar project. This simultaneous search for meaning and exposure of its insecure roots – a longing for ‘authentic absolute, or absolute authenticity’ running alongside a ‘violent, expressive […] perspectivism’, as Paul Edwards puts it – resonated with radical political ideas surrounding and permeating artistic circles.12 A metaphoric link between popular insurgency and the ‘revolution in art’ was common in the period.13 More specifically, theories of visual, as well as linguistic, abstraction shared philosophical roots with accounts of alienation in mass politics. Vorticism, like Imagism, coincided with a period of industrial unrest, close at hand in the radical content of the New Age and the Egoist.14 These journals’ antistatist rhetoric, which earlier influenced Hulme’s and Pound’s poetics, similarly gave Vorticism a political inflection. We have seen how Pound’s 1913 injunction that poets ‘go in fear of abstractions’ echoed a libertarian distrust of political structures.15 Most conspicuously at The Egoist, Dora Marsden’s Stirnerian polemics against the ‘spooks’ of Idealist (and Liberal) philosophy presented a very specific ideological backdrop to which, as Beasley has shown, Pound’s writing on art responded.16 However, the New Age also sought an individual ‘intensification’ via Guild Socialism. The attempt in poetry to capture intuitive experience on the brink of conceptualization mirrors the utopian notion, refined by Orage’s circle, of equilibrium between individual consciousness and a guild-based national government. In early 1913, Pound presented Imagism as a loose collective: ‘a school exists when two or three young men agree, more or less, to call certain things good’.17 Similarly, unlike the anonymized, cooperative practice of the Omega Workshop, Vorticism was ‘a movement of individuals, for individuals, for the protection of individuality’.18 Lewis identified Vorticism

142

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

as ‘an art of Individuals’ in Blast.19 Yet, at the same time, each man tried to impose his ideas on the movement.20 We have seen how Hulme’s philosophical interests were dramatized in his enthusiasm for fraternities, for the ‘discord’ or ‘secession’ club – microcosms of the ‘one and the many’, the individual and society. I propose that this balancing of individuality and common purpose is reminiscent not only of syndicalism, but also of the visual tension that Hulme most valued and wished to preserve in art, between the mud of contingency and the chessboard of rationalism and between empirical detail and abstract form. Alongside the political analogy, I want to highlight two related metaphors prevalent in treatments of modern art. Much has been said about how modernist writing adopted scientific terms.21 The analogy of speciation, used to describe the fragmenting factions of the pre-war art world, reflects another level of concern with philosophical ‘essences’. Around 1910, when the ‘real’ or ‘nominal’ quality of species distinctions was in dispute, the rhetoric of biological essentialism was close at hand in descriptions of Post-Impressionism and its splintering factions.22 ‘The new art is fissiparous’, wrote Fry, imagining the London Group exhibition of 1914 as a petri dish of subdividing cells.23 Critics vied to name the proliferating new species. Examples of the new art, Hulme wrote, were ‘rather like embryos. I think they will soon open out and grow distinct’.24 Pound, describing Vorticism as a ‘movement of individuals’, notes that ‘if there is such a process as evolution it is closely associated with the differentiation of species […] the individual has been more easily discernible from the herd’.25 In 1918, he wrote ‘Vorticism is, in the realm of biology, the hypothesis of the dominant cell.’26 While hostile to teleological evolutionism applied to human consciousness, Hulme believed modern art signalled a fundamental shift in Western culture and described its emergence in evolutionary terms.27 This did not conflict with his conviction that human nature remained static, in which respect he disagreed with contemporary vitalists, including those within the Vorticist circle. Hulme believed in permanent forms of human temperament, which, under new environmental and technological circumstances, would only superficially alter, for example in modern art. A second, prescient metaphor was of war between nations, reified ideological forces corresponding to fixed geographic borders. Much has been said on this motif in pre-war modernism; Herbert Schneidau suggests that the shift from the metaphor of revolution to one of war is the distinguishing feature of Vorticism.28 For several years the British public was more or less conscious of the threat posed by a militarized Germany, and the national characteristics and relative vigour of

Varieties of Abstraction

143

future combatants in a European conflict were matters of public debate. It is telling that the battle-lines of British art were drawn with militaristic fervour in the same months that the continent descended towards war. Moreover, the notion of clashing global powers was elided with theories of speciation, as the geopolitical crisis was analysed in racial, social Darwinist and Nietzschean terms, not least in the New Age.29 Lewis, a major source for the rhetoric of ‘enemies’ in violent conflict, told readers of his 1928 memoir, ‘you will be astonished to find how like art is to war’. Much is said, he notes, ‘about how a war just-finished effects art’. Vorticism showed how ‘a war about to start can do the same thing’.30 Pound’s writing became noticeably more war-like in his Vorticist phase: ‘We will sweep out the last century as surely as Attila swept across Europe’, he wrote in early 1914.31 It was sometimes unclear who was friend and who was foe; Flint rebuked Pound in 1915 for his failure as an Imagist ‘comrade’: ‘you might have been generalissimo in a compact onslaught; and you spoiled everything through some native incapacity to walk foursquare with your fellows’.32 Internecine and international conflict became blurred, as Lewis witnessed: ‘war, art, civil war, strikes and coup d’etats dovetail into each other’.33 The Vorticist campaign relied on alliances as provisional as those dividing Europe. Hulme’s insistence on drawing a ‘complicated line’ around his specific position anticipated the intricacies of the Western Front, an association he made explicit in 1915.34 Anti-statist, martial and biological metaphors are not unique to Vorticist aesthetics, but they are noticeably heightened in the discourse of pre-war London modernists.35 Artistic factions, resembling guilds or syndicats, broke up and regrouped, redrawing the political map of the avant-garde. They claimed evolutionary ascendancy by grouping themselves by likeness into abstract unity. These figures of speech were equally applicable because they reflect in different ways a vexed instinct to establish essential fixed qualities existing within or above the messy flux of sensory experience. One common feature of pre-war modernist criticism is perhaps this navigation between nominalism and realism. As Patricia Rae has shown, Hulme’s emergent position is distinctive for its Jamesian quality, its recognition of the requirement for, and limits of, cognitive maps, and its tensional position between a need for order and alertness to artifice.36 The bitter contest for yards of land in Belgium and France was similarly both absurd and necessary in his view. In his last notes on politics, Hulme refines a very particular balance, informed by James, Sorel and Pascal, between authority and liberty and between a religious faith in higher values and an unswerving recognition of specific individual experience.

144

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Post-Impressionism The history of Post-Impressionism is well known, and there is no need to recount in detail the introduction of modern French art into Britain. The lag in British taste reflected the conservatism not only of the Royal Academy, but also of the once-radical New English Art Club. Of the latter’s founding members, Walter Sickert retained a radical edge: leader of the ‘London Impressionists’ who exhibited together in 1889, he returned from self-imposed continental exile in 1905 and, with the support of Slade graduates Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman, founded the Fitzroy Street Group and later the Camden Town Group. Standing for an impressionistic but formally sophisticated modern art, Sickert and his allies were important interlocutors with Hulme’s circle.37 The Sunday Times critic Frank Rutter’s Allied Artists Association exhibitions at the Royal Albert Hall represented another conduit for the latest continental work to reach England; modelled on the Salon des Indépendants, it showed a vast range of work selected democratically by a rotating committee. However, it was Roger Fry who presented the new art as a single movement. Hulme’s debt to Fry is conspicuous – as is his determination to supersede him. Fry set up a vocabulary for formalist art criticism, the nuances of which have been discussed thoroughly elsewhere.38 A student of the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, he acquired a sense of psychological investment in line and colour, refined through extensive study of early Renaissance art. In 1908, he wrote in defence of what critics dismissed as ‘the last phase of Impressionism’ by comparing Cézanne and Gauguin’s stylized works to early Byzantine art.39 His ‘Essay in Aesthetics’ (1909) employed a distinction between the imaginative and the practical life to explain how art permits the disinterested appreciation of expressive form. Although wary of philosophical language, Fry echoed post-Kantian accounts of aesthetic vision penetrating through the veil of appearances to perceive ‘thing in themselves’. Formal structure in painting facilitated the apprehension of essences behind visual data.40 Post-Impressionism in his terms represented the rediscovery of form, following a misguided pursuit of pure retinal experience in modern Western art, culminating in impressionism. Form could be found in primitive, Byzantine and non-Western art. Fry, identifying these structural qualities with the French tradition of Poussin, Claude and Ingres, called them ‘classic’.41 Hulme discusses modern art in remarkably similar terms from 1911, championing ‘classicism’, associating it with primitivism and drawing a distinction between ‘practical’ and ‘imaginative’ consciousness. His early comments on art restage Fry’s negotiation between intuitive experience and formal hardness.42

Varieties of Abstraction

145

While a line of influence is clear, Hulme also took ideas directly from Fry’s sources in the Parisian avant-garde. The convergence of Fry and Hulme’s thinking is perhaps traceable to such intermediaries as Maurice Denis, whose seminal essay on Cézanne Fry translated and introduced for the Burlington Magazine in January 1910.43 Mark Antliff and Katherine Kuenzli have shown in detail Denis’s rootedness in the cultural politics of the French avant-garde.44 His aesthetic responded to ideas appealing to Hulme. Moving in Action française and Sorelian circles, Denis combined a Maurrasian rhetoric of classicism with an emphasis on intuitive expression, reminiscent of Bergson. This explains why, as Richard Shiff has shown, Denis’s theory contained a tension between ‘expression’ and ‘structure’, in its identification of an oxymoronic ‘spontaneous classicism’ in Cézanne’s work. Fry placed this notion at the heart of Post-Impressionism, while confessing to find it ‘exceedingly subtle and difficult to analyse’.45 This tension is roughly akin to Hulme’s similar struggle to reconcile Bergson with Maurrasian classicism, via Sorel. The Maurras–Bergson–Sorel nexus sheds much light on Hulme’s ‘tensional’ aesthetic, which responds to an age of accelerated egoism but seeks to re-establish a lost objective order, half-admitting its fictiveness, half open to the consolations of philosophical realism. Fry is considered at greater length below, but it is worth noting these broadly shared concerns now, as they shaped the reception of Post-Impressionism and explain the divisions emerging within its ranks. Denis’s oxymoronic formulation was always prone to imbalance and, in Fry’s interpretation, its weighting shifted over time. Between the first and second Post-Impressionist Exhibitions, in 1910 and 1912, respectively, there was a corresponding change in critical treatments of the new art. The emphasis on ‘expression’ in accounts of Cézanne, Van Gogh and the Fauves gave way to an emphasis on form, in treatments of Picasso and the Cubists. Benedict Nicolson has shown how Fry led the way in emphasizing first, in 1911, ‘expressionism’ and later, in 1912, ‘formalism’, but despite this accommodation, he and his Bloomsbury allies were ambivalent towards Cubism.46 Younger English painters, led by Wyndham Lewis, were more open to radical continental art and, growing impatient with Fry, turned against him in 1913. Their denunciation of his aesthetic following the ‘Ideal Home Rumpus’ has been recounted many times.47 As the new, vigorous abstraction of Lewis and his allies gained prominence, Hulme first entered the debate. The New Age’s role as an early venue for these clashing schools of modern art should be noted here. In 1910, months before Fry’s exhibition, Huntly Carter began his career as art critic by promoting Picasso in Orage’s journal. Carter and John Middleton Murry promoted a Bergsonian school of Fauvism as well as a Platonic,

146

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

or neo-Kantian, reading of Cubism over the following months.48 At Carter’s invitation, Sickert began contributing essays and drawings to support his version of modern art from 1910.49 But it was in early 1914, as English Post-Impressionism broke up into opposing factions, that the New Age debate hit its stride. Hulme was by this time settled in his opinions, which are worth recapping up to this point.

The development of Hulme’s aesthetic 1908–1914 Hulme in his 1908 ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ expressly admired forms of ‘Impressionism’, identifying Whistler as its exemplar. This was in line with the literary aesthetic he had outlined in his lecture, which emphasized attentiveness to thought patterns, to fleeting movement of thoughts and feelings.50 In ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ (1911), Hulme addressed the need to break up visual cliché. Here, he cited Sickert as exemplary of the artistic impulse described in Bergson’s Le Rire (1901) as a drive to break through conventional form to capture the precise nature of physical things.51 In unpublished notes entitled ‘Plan for a Book on Modern Theories of Art’ (1912), Hulme showed a knowledge of modern German aesthetic theories, as well as citing Ribot and Bergson again.52 Hulme now took a particular interest in Theodor Lipps’ theory of empathy, or Einfühlung, which proposed that artists projected emotive and sensual experience into aesthetic form. The harmonic and formal power of the resulting works of art would recreate feelings of a similar force and vitality for the viewer. These ideas, close in spirit to Bergson but also to the British critic Bernard Berenson’s influential formalism, were promoted by Vernon Lee in her treatise Beauty and Ugliness (1912). Finally, in Hulme’s 1914 lecture ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, Wilhelm Worringer’s influence came to the fore. Hulme’s lecture was, as he declared, ‘practically a paraphrase’ of Worringer’s first book  Abstraction and Empathy  (1907). This established three or four main principles: art history is not the history of ability but the history of volition, a principle taken from Alois Riegl, another art critic with links to the empathy school. We can see two main forms of volition in art history: one was empathetic, corresponding to the aesthetic appreciation outlined by Vischer, Groos, Lipps, and Lee and Berenson. Empathetic art is close in spirit to that described by Bergson in that the artist or viewer projects their internal life upon something perceived outside themselves. As Hulme recounts, Worringer saw this art as correlating with a confidence and contentment in the universe. The second form of artistic volition involved, in contrast, a rejection of the vital world. Rather than wishing to feel itself into the world, it wanted life, in

Varieties of Abstraction

147

all its state of flux and growth and change, to halt. It desired security in a daunting universe; it was motivated by fear, a kind of agoraphobia. This kind of art was first evident in the earliest primitive art. A different kind of the same feeling could be seen in different cultures. In primitives, the feeling was fear, whereas in the Byzantine world, it emerged in a kind of disdain for human affairs. The alternation of these two principles can be seen throughout art history.53 Hulme proceeded by analysing and criticizing several differing aesthetic positions held by his contemporaries, including the New Age critic Anthony Ludovici, Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury group, Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group, Wyndham Lewis and finally David Bomberg. In considering his comments on each of these, this chapter picks out areas of conceptual overlap linking various individuals, all of whom, as contributors to the avant-garde discussion about art, could be described as ‘modernists’. Yet, within this category, there existed large differences, often disguised by rhetorical similarity. Perhaps the most aggressively contested were ideas of ‘classicism’ developed by those Hulme identified as enemies, for example, Ludovici and Fry. Other disputes, for example those with Orage, or Sickert and the Camden Town Group, were friendlier, taking the form of lively salon debate among mutual admirers. Critical treatment of a close ally like Lewis was bitter for different reasons, reflecting personal jealousies, although also discerning real aesthetic differences. Hulme’s most unequivocal praise, for work by Epstein and Bomberg, was revealing in its struggle to find expression. What follows is a survey of these family resemblances in turn, considering their motivations and their implications for Hulme’s final position.

Ludovici and Epstein In late 1913, Hulme drafted a review of Epstein’s first solo exhibition at the Twenty-One Gallery, which included the sculptor’s latest and most experimental work: Carvings in Flenite, the Birth drawings and preliminary drawings for the Rock Drill. In his review, Hulme identified his theory of the emerging new art on Epstein’s progress from naturalism through archaism to a new geometric art. The Carvings in Flenite, small, totemic figures bent in rigid, hieratic submission, represented the culmination of Epstein’s archaic stage. Hulme’s greatest enthusiasm was reserved for the Birth drawings. Particularly one entitled ‘Creation’ - ‘a baby seen within many folds’. Here Epstein rendered the most vital of subjects, a foetus at the moment of birth, in highly abstract form, giving Hulme a perfect example of Worringer’s theory of abjection54

148

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

The review that Hulme contributed instead to the New Age contained much of the same argument, but in the form of a defensive retort to hostile reviews Epstein received from several papers. In particular, Anthony Ludovici, regular art critic of the New Age, had been dismissive of Epstein’s work. Ludovici had developed over the previous weeks a critical approach to modern art, measured by its reflection of societal health, the union of individuals under a moral code, or ‘great order’. ‘When the plastic arts can no longer interpret the external world in the terms of a great order […] they exalt the idiosyncrasy or individual angle of the isolated ego.’ Without this sense of a ‘great order or scheme of life, shared by all […] art has no interest whatsoever, save for cranks’; it reflects a ‘purposeless individualism à outrance’. Epstein’s work was ‘the particular angle of vision of a minor personality’, of no value.55 Hulme responded in a notorious piece that spent as much time attacking Ludovici as defending Epstein. Refuting the charge that Epstein used alien formulae to convey feelings unknown to Western man, Hulme repeated his theory of archaic art, describing primitive form as a ‘permanent alphabet’ of human emotion that needed to be restated in modern terms. Epstein’s work represented a rejection of a set of values, something critics had not grasped. Hulme veers from Worringer’s scholarly analysis into Maurrasian polemic: ‘Modern feeling be damned! As if it was not the duty of every honest man at the present moment to clean the world of these sloppy dregs of the Renaissance.’ Ludovici’s ‘comical little book on Nietszche’ revealed ‘a little Cockney intellect’, incapable of fathoming a philosophy he only superficially grasps, like ‘a child of four in a theatre watching a tragedy based on adultery’. Hulme is willing to accept Ludovici’s argument that ‘Great art can only appear when the artist is animated by the spirit of some great order or scheme of life’, affirming that ‘the more serious kind of art that one likes sprang out of organic societies like the India, Egyptian, and Byzantine’. These were ‘obvious platitudes’. However, while the idea may be true, Ludovici, as in his reading of Nietzsche, has adopted a ‘tag’, a formula of words, without understanding its true significance. The tenor of the piece can be summed up in Hulme’s remark that ‘the most appropriate means of dealing with [Ludovici] would be a little personal violence.’ Hulme distances himself from Ludovici’s crude reading of the Genealogy of Morals, by contemplating, but then deciding against physical violence: ‘the unworthy sentiment of pity for the weak, which, in spite of Nietzsche, still moves us, prevents us dealing drastically with this rather light-weight superman’.56 In the following weeks, the New Age published an extensive debate regarding this confrontation. Letters from readers mocked and questioned

Varieties of Abstraction

149

Hulme.57 Ludovici responded, citing Nietzsche defensively, in ‘An Open Letter to My Friends’ two weeks later, while Lewis wrote in support of Hulme.58 An anonymous poem, perhaps by Beatrice Hastings, poked fun at Hulme’s aggression.59 Ardis presents the debate as part of her case that a fundamental antagonism divided the New Age’s editorial personnel from the promoters of literary and artistic modernism. Indeed, satirical barbs written by Hastings, Orage’s lover, were directed at Pound and Lewis over the same period, while Orage, writing as ‘R.H.C.’, commented sceptically on Vorticism in his ‘Readers and Writers’ column.60 However, Orage’s commentary on the Epstein controversy did not simply condemn Hulme but rather revealed how overlapping positions connected the participants in the debate at various points, while setting them against each other in other respects. Orage noted that Hulme ‘has constructed an imposing myth’, but the notion that ‘we are to recognise primitive vision when we see it and to appreciate whatever has been constructed on a great order of society’ was dismissed: ‘Rigmarole, I say, rigmarole’. However, Orage did not reject the idea out of hand. Rather he added his own nuances: One does not need a myth or even the prehistoric sense to appreciate and be ‘charmed’ by simplicity [my italics] wherever it appears; but is Mr. Epstein’s recent work either simple or primitive? To my mind it has neither the quality of children’s work nor the quality of savages’ work; it is not intense as children are intense, nor intense as savages are intense; but, on the other hand, it is supersophisticated and exactly as comparable with its models as the modern gollywogs are with the dolls of our youth.61

The key word here is ‘simplicity’ and goes some way to indicating shared ground as much as conflict. As shown in Chapter 3, Orage’s thinking had been shaped early on by Carpenter’s notion of the ‘simple life’, a state of utopian freedom from the alienating complexity of the modern: a return to animal-like unity of consciousness. Modernist primitivism has common roots with this romantic notion of a restored simplicity. For Orage, these ideas had taken a conservative turn, as I have shown, and by 1914, he subscribed to the notion of a classicist revival in which individual fruition was made possible through collective acceptance of an ethical order. He, like Hulme, accepts Ludovici’s basic point: ‘Nobody will deny that what my colleague, Mr. Ludovici, calls “a great order of society” is lacking in most men’s minds to-day (even, I say with trembling, in Mr. Ludovici’s)’.62 Yet Orage sees in Epstein’s art and Hulme’s theory a ‘sophistication’ that stands at odds with such a ‘simplicity’. This, I argue, was his real charge against modernism: not that its politics was wrong, but that its mode

150

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

of expression was too self-conscious, too clever and too arch. Hulme’s criticism of Ludovici was identical to Orage’s criticism of them both: their critical ‘tags’ – codewords, mottoes and dicta – rang true, but Hulme, Epstein and Ludovici all failed to grasp their true meaning. It is telling that, however, Orage’s scepticism regarding Ludovici would predominate over the following weeks. Close on the heels of the Epstein debate, Orage picked a fight with Ludovici himself on different grounds, as I explain below. It is possible to draw some lines of distinction between Hulme and Ludovici and then to draw lines of overlap between Hulme, Epstein and Orage. Accounts tend to lump Ludovici’s views together with Hulme’s as those of the New Age ‘right’. In this view, Hulme’s quarrel with Ludovici merely reflects their similar mindsets. Driven by the narcissism of small differences, Hulme’s aggression reveals a typically modernist elitism or paranoid posturing.63 However, this composite view risks blurring important differences. Hulme’s strenuous efforts to distinguish his position from Ludovici’s should be registered seriously. It is the first stage in his project to establish the boundaries between the aesthetic he saw as gradually coming to fruition in modern art and his critical fellow travellers whose thinking, often despite an apparent resemblance, differed profoundly. Ludovici, Hulme’s exact contemporary, made his name with a series of public lectures on Nietzsche at University College London in Autumn 1908. His career thus began at the same moment, in the same neighbourhood, as those of Hulme, Flint, Pound, Lewis and Epstein. The comparison is all the more revealing for the fact that Ludovici became the most extreme intellectual champion of fascism in Britain until his death in 1971. Hulme recalls that his first encounter with this writer came through an invitation, probably from Orage, to review one of the Ludovici’s books.64 It seems likely that this was Nietzsche and Art (1911), in the event reviewed enthusiastically by Kennedy in August 1911.65 Ludovici’s book transposed his Nietzschean beliefs into a précis of the history of art. His argument also drew on the work of Worringer, adapting the latter’s theory of abstract and empathetic art to fit a Nietzschean contrast between the Apollonian and Dionysian, the ruler and the masses and order and anarchy. This was more than two years before Hulme cited Worringer for his own purposes. Ludovici’s citations of Abstraction and Empathy were, however, tendentious: ‘The author also shows very ably that […] the first impulse in the selective artist is not to imitate Nature, but to obtain a symmetrical and systematic arrangement of lines, to gratify his will to be master of natural disorder [my italics].’66 The emphasis is not on a ‘spiritual dread of space’, but on the instinct to control it.

Varieties of Abstraction

151

The difference might lie in the subtle distinction that Worringer draws between primitive cultures that live ‘before’ knowledge and the Orientals who operate ‘above’ it.67 In Hulme’s account of Worringer, a similar distinction is made between those working ‘before’ and ‘above’ rationalism; also connected to this is a distinction between primitive fear of the world and Byzantine ‘contempt’ for it. Hulme does not identify the modern spirit with one or the other specifically, except to say that it is ‘inhuman, pessimistic’.68 What Worringer elsewhere suggests is that the primitive sense of the unknowable, the ‘thing in itself ’, was lost through a long phase of rationalism but had swum back into view owing to the growing sense of the limits of science.69 Ludovici, however, following Nietzsche’s lead in Human, All Too Human, among other places, dismissed the existence of the ‘thing in itself ’, seeing only a monistic world of phenomena to be controlled by the mastering mind.70 This is a different principle to Hulme’s and to Worringer’s. Ludovici adapted the latter’s ideas, as he had Nietzsche’s, to suit his understanding of the ‘will to power’, with irritating, but prescient ease.71 Worringer’s dualism, already reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, was extended in Form in Gothic (1910) to correlate with North and South, Germanic and Mediterranean and the distinction thus gained a racial character. During the 1930s, Worringer’s ideas were appropriated to support the Nazi distinction between ‘degenerate’ and ‘wholesome’ art.72 We can, then, distinguish Hulme’s focus on Worringerian ‘abjection’ from Ludovici’s call for a Nietzschean ‘ruler art’. Admittedly, the Rock Drill (Figure 1) might be cited as an exception – how does this image of potency fit with Hulme’s Worringerian theory of abjection? It is perhaps the most Hulmean of Epstein’s 1913 works, an attempt to move on from his primitivist sculptures to an image of modernity, as Hulme had called for in his criticism. Epstein produced a creature elevated, apparently triumphant, on a symbol of technological might. Yet this is not what Ludovici would call ‘ruler art’, for the immense phallic power depicted is that of an industrial labourer. Epstein described it as a ‘robot’ – the first, Richard Cork suggests, in modern art. This term, introduced to modern usage by Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (1920), derives from the Czech, or Old Russian, meaning ‘slave’.73 (The first English translation of the play, interestingly, was by the New Age contributor Paul Selver, an expert on Slavic language and literature, who was close to Orage, Hulme and probably Epstein.)74 Moreover, David Bomberg, recalling first seeing the sculpture in December 1913, was the first of many to see in the ‘tense figure’, a soldier, ‘operating the Drill as if it were a Machine Gun’: he noted how the figure had been ‘a Prophetic Symbol […] of the impending war’.75 Finally, between the creature’s ribs appears a child in utero,

152

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Figure 1  Jacob Epstein, Rock Drill (Reconstruction, 1974). Polyester resin, wood and ready-made drill. 205 cm × 141.5 cm. Credit: © The artist’s estate / Photo © Birmingham Museums Trust.

‘protectively ensconced’, as Epstein put it.76 The creature’s potency is undeniable, but it depends paradoxically on its status and apparatus as a worker, soldier and mother. As Cork has recently noted, the figure’s industrial equipment calls to mind the 1912 miners’ strikes, which threatened to bring the country to a standstill.77

Varieties of Abstraction

153

The drill in the miners’ hands is a sign of subjugation and a potentially menacing energy.78 Driller and gunner and mother are empowered by their subordination to their work – recalling the tense dynamic between master and slave sketched by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, inherited by Marx and echoed by Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Indeed, as Cork remarks, the plaster cast figure has a touch of vulnerability, despite its armour and aggressive pose. Virile and optimistic in Epstein’s initial sketches, its head droops down towards the task at hand in the first version of the sculpture: ‘wary, even fearful, of the effect his machine will have on the world […] a figure haunted by responsibility’.79 The Rock Drill is about power, but power under the conditions of servitude. Its form was conceived alongside images of abjection in Epstein’s 1913–1914 output, including the Birth drawings, the Carvings in Flenite and another remarkable sculpture, based on an African totemic figure, entitled Cursed be the Day Wherein I was Born (all 1913–1914). As the New Age debated the quarrel over Epstein, the political suggestiveness of work such as this brought out differences of ideology not just between Hulme and Ludovici, but also between Ludovici and Orage. Orage’s dispute with Ludovici, which rapidly followed, and referred back to, the Epstein controversy, revolved around the editor’s determination to find in Nietzsche the rationale for Guild Socialism. In particular, he cited in ‘Readers and Writers’ an aphorism he had discovered in the new English edition of The Will to Power, which suggested that workmen should learn to regard their duties as soldiers do. These receive emoluments, incomes, but they do not get wages. There is no relationship between work done and money received; the individual should, according to his kind, be so placed as to perform the highest that is compatible with his powers. 80

Orage seized on this validation of his long-held belief that only the Guild idea could provide the right conditions for the birth of the Übermensch. Moreover, Orage provocatively added, it was Ludovici who had translated this particular aphorism, and it would do him good to bear it in mind.81 The following week, Ludovici wrote to protest at the citation of his translation for this socialist purpose. The Guild idea, believing as it did in ‘the people […] and its ability to select the right leaders’, was incompatible with Nietzsche’s ‘transvaluation of values’.82 Orage responded in the same number, refuting Ludovici’s elitism as a misinterpretation of their shared source: ‘The NEW AGE is carrying out and putting into practice a doctrine of which only the empty phrase and shell appeal to Mr. Ludovici’.83 Or, as Hulme had put it,

154

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Ludovici was merely repeating ‘tags’ without grasping their meaning. ‘Man’, Orage had long insisted, ‘is pre-eminently the pregnant animal’, a being on the edge of evolutionary progress, on the brink of elevation to a new condition.84 He believed that the gestation of the Übermensch would accelerate if the labourer had the autonomy granted by a soldier’s fixed salary and rank, an utterly reliable ‘great order’ within which to work. The blossoming, expressive individuality of the labourer, or indeed the artist, would be incubated by his subordination to a higher power. Ludovici, champion of the aristocracy, was understandably irked by Orage’s appropriation of his work. Conversely, and despite his scepticism regarding Hulme’s theory and Epstein’s practice, Orage’s words seem to resonate with the image of the Rock Drill. If Epstein’s experimentation came closer to capturing Guild Socialist ideas than Orage would concede, it may reflect the fact that the sculptor worked within, and responded to, a milieu of radical politics. Evelyn Silber and Cork record how he spent his early life in the company of anarchists and socialists, in New York, Paris and London.85 His youthful friendship with Emma Goldman and his readings in Whitman, Carpenter and Emerson all point to Epstein’s streak of romantic libertarianism. His alliance with Gill channelled this spirit, blurring ideology with sexuality: the direct carving both men practised was not only envisaged as a Ruskinian craft, but also as an act of phallic creativity. 86 The intimacy of these sculptors with the New Age ethos can be seen in the fact that Eric Gill designed the journal’s letter heading.87 Epstein began working on his new abstract sculptures in 1912, the year of the coal strike, and also the year in which Orage had begun to formulate the principles of Guild Socialism. It seems likely that reports of industrial strife, combined with the political speculations of his friends, informed Epstein’s decision to install the mechanical drill as part of his work.88 It is, in any case, not surprising to find echoes of Orage’s rhetoric in Epstein’s sculpture, which clearly responds to the intellectual climate at a very particular moment. The tensions between these ideas swarm around the work in question, which, as Cork has suggested, also hint at its status as self-portrait. Thus, the artist is presented as industrial labourer, as well as soldier, and Nietzschean ‘pregnant animal’.89

Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group Another case of misleading ideological resemblances is brought to light in Hulme’s treatment of Bloomsbury modernism. Again, a form of pluralistic ideology was being explored by Fry and his allies, but it was a much diluted

Varieties of Abstraction

155

form of the industrial ambitions outlined by the New Age, and its aesthetic was correspondingly mild – to Hulme’s eyes, Bloomsbury art proved unable to extricate itself from a romantic primitivism and to move into a hard modern abstraction. In January 1914, he consolidated his position as art critic at the New Age with the first piece in a series entitled ‘Modern Art’, beginning with a review of the Grafton Group, the exhibiting society established by Fry to promote British Post-Impressionism. Following the quarrels of 1913, Lewis and several of his allies had left the group, leaving behind its core members Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Hulme’s review of the second Grafton exhibition provided an opportunity for him to target Fry, echoing Lewis’s earlier remarks in his public letter known as the ‘Round Robin’ (1913).90 Hulme observes that Fry, following the Post-Impressionist success, ‘probably regards himself, and is certainly regarded by many others, as the representative of the new direction in art’. The earlier Grafton exhibitions ‘were sufficiently comprehensive and varied to make this opinion seem plausible […] a mixture of a sort of aesthetic archaism and a more vigorous cubism […] helped to maintain the illusion [of] one movement’. However, ‘the departure of Mr. Wyndham Lewis, Mr. Etchells, Mr. Nevinson and several others has left concentrated in a purer form all the worked-out and dead elements in the movement […] Mr. Fry and his group are a kind of backwater’.91 Surveying the exhibition, Hulme focused on the use of colour: ‘almost uniformly of pallid chalky blues, yellows and strawberry colours, with a strong family resemblance between all the pictures’. In the subjects chosen, Hulme recognized ‘the whole familiar bag of tricks […] Cézanne landscapes […] still lifes […] Eves in their gardens, and the botched Byzantine’. He attacked Fry’s ‘inability to follow a method to its proper conclusion. The colour is always rather sentimental and pretty. He thus accomplishes the extraordinary feat of adapting the austere Cezanne into something quite fitted for chocolate boxes’. The group’s error, Hulme argued, was to persevere with archaic forms ‘after the necessity for that experimentation had passed by’. What resulted was ‘a mere utilisation of the archaic in the spirit of the aesthetic […] a plaything to a certain quaintness’. Duncan Grant’s Adam and Eve contained ‘elements taken out of the extremely intense and serious Byzantine art are used in an entirely meaningless and pointless way’. The result was ‘flimsy’. Highlighting a summary from another review, ‘the fascination of reality seen through a cultured mind’, Hulme identifies this art with ‘a typically Cambridge sort of atmosphere’. Talking from recent experience, he continues ‘I know the kind of dons who buy these pictures […] the dilettante appreciation.’ This was, Hulme concluded, ‘a sort of aesthetic playing about’, and repeating a charge from Lewis again, ‘a new

156

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

disguise of aestheticism’. Despite outward differences, they evince ‘the same serious queerness of the Pre-Raphaelites […] quaint and playful; but essentially the same English aesthetic […] the same cultured reminiscent pleasure’. He concluded that ‘just as the one ultimately declined into Liberty’s, so there is no reason why the other should not find its grave in some emporium which will provide the wives of young and advanced dons with suitable house decoration. What is living and important in new art must be looked for elsewhere’.92 Despite these remarks, Hulme had come close to agreeing with Fry’s account of the expressive quality of the new art in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ (1911). Hulme’s lecture echoed, whether consciously or not, Fry’s well-known ‘Essay in Aesthetics’ and relied, in its concluding statement, on Fry’s key source, Bernard Berenson’s Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (1896). It also chimed with the German theory of empathy set out by Vernon Lee, closely related to both Berenson and Fry’s thinking. Hulme’s contribution was to bring Bergson to the table, suggesting that he offered a full explanation of what other thinkers could only adumbrate. Bergson’s theory is shown to provide a complete system of a kind that studies such as Berenson’s, and by implication, Fry’s, lacked. Similarly, Hulme’s later, Worringerian aesthetic was by no means antithetical to Fry’s. Fry’s theory was indebted to the modern Idealist school of aesthetics in its reconfiguration of a basically Platonic structure: rather than a shadow of a shadow of the Ideal, art was a means to break through the veil of appearances, its disinterested vision permitting a glimpse of ‘things-in-themselves’. This was broadly compatible with Worringer’s theory, which saw in the primitive impulse to freeze phenomena a means to apprehend things more profoundly. Primitive art, Worringer argued, was Kantian without knowing it, for it sought to fix the essence of things. This impulse had been hidden as man became civilized and overconfident in the apparatus of everyday cognition; it recurred in modern neo-Kantianism, in the recognition of the limits of reason. In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (1912), Hulme notes with interest and approval Denis’s use of the term ‘classicism’ to describe Post-Impressionism.93 It was Fry who had translated, published and promoted Denis’s argument. However, Hulme and Fry took different things from Denis’s argument. As noted, ‘classicism’ as presented by Denis was oxymoronic: he admired the ‘spontaneous classic’, reflecting the volatile mixture of vitalist and Neo-Royalist rhetoric in Denis’s French milieu.94 Fry and Hulme inherited this paradox, which represents one source of tensions in modernism on a much wider scale. As discussed above, some critics resolve tensions in Fry’s criticism by perceiving a movement from the pole of expressivism to that of formalism, but the truth is somewhat more

Varieties of Abstraction

157

complicated. For now, I want to note how Fry’s negotiation of these antinomies parallels Hulme’s similar efforts from 1911 to 1912 to bring together Bergson and Maurras. Hulme like Denis, and Fry, sought a way of combining a taste for structure, order and stasis, with a desire for immediacy, spontaneity and intensified expression. Hulme’s criticism of Fry is that he remains stuck in the ‘expressivist’ camp and fails to achieve an authentic ‘classicism’, despite his use of that term. This is evident in his reliance on outdated aesthetic criteria relating to emotion, ‘prettiness’ and ‘beauty’. Fry thus misunderstands what Denis’s French cultural politics entails and, worse, remains ignorant of a much bigger cultural shift, of which Worringer was a philosophical harbinger. Classicism is not merely a question of stylistic revival, but for Hulme, a sign of the ‘break up of […] the Renaissance’, a profound change in human taste across Europe.95 Hulme’s argument in ‘Modern Art I’ is that Fry and Bloomsbury had failed to shake off an engrained humanism. The increasing use of the term ‘classicism’ was superficial. It might be argued that ‘expressivism’ was being replaced by formalism in the theories of Clive Bell, with which Fry expressed admiration if not total approval. But, despite declaring his belief in pure form, Bell’s account of this phenomenon in fact elevated the value, in the act of creation or appreciation, of ‘aesthetic emotion’. Expressivism was not dispelled but merely made exclusive to a select few. Bell’s formalism involved a refinement of expressivism, not its elimination. Just as the ‘aesthetic emotion’ seemed to be retained for a select few by Bell’s pure form, so we can see a difference with Hulme’s insistence that art reflects a profound change in humanity’s attitude towards life. The preciousness and exclusivity of the Bloomsbury aesthetic went together, in its critics’ eyes, with an indifference to deeper questions of ethics and politics. Fry had been presented in art history, somewhat unfairly, as a detached aesthete, willing to draw a deep distinction between art and life. The evidence of this is the famous essay of 1917 ‘Art and Life’, which expands Fry’s distinction in the ‘Essay in Aesthetics’ between the imaginative and the practical consciousness, to outline a process of artistic development entirely separate from economic, political, religious or philosophical history. The contrast with Worringer and Hulme is most apparent here. Elsewhere, Fry’s argument seems to alter profoundly, particularly in his call for a socially engaged art in ‘Art and the Great Society’ (1917), included under the title of ‘Art and Socialism’ in Vision and Design (1920). Here, the political inheritance of the 1890s, rather than the Paterian aesthesis of ‘Art and Life’, comes to the fore. Indeed, the principles behind the Omega Workshops had something in common with those circulating in Hulme’s circle, most

158

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

obviously at the New Age, the home of Guild Socialism. Broadly speaking, the Guild idea was ‘in the air’ for a generation raised on Ruskin and Morris. One of Fry’s college friends was C. R. Ashbee, a founding figure in the Edwardian Arts and Crafts Movement, with whom he made a pilgrimage to meet Edward Carpenter in 1886. Fry’s full-length portrait of Carpenter (1894), now in the National Portrait Gallery, is testimony to an intellectual debt he shared with Orage and the New Age. However, in Fry’s usage, these ideas bear only a remote ‘family resemblance’ to Orage’s radical movement.96 Hulme had close links to intellectuals working in the Guild Socialist camp, not only Orage, but Ramiro de Maeztu, with whom he was soon to develop a vigorous, Pascalian programme of conservative ethics combined with Guild Socialist politics. The Omega Workshops must have seemed a pale reflection of the industrial reform worked out in depth at the New Age, a paper that catered for radical working and lower middle-class autodidacts rather than the Cambridge- Bloomsbury milieu, associated more with the liberal Nation. Fry’s cooperative venture, an ‘anaemic’ and delicate cousin of Guild Socialism, clearly left Hulme unimpressed, as we see in his snide comparison of the Omega Workshop to Liberty’s, the famous department store that sold Arts and Crafts-style goods to the middle classes.97 Lewis had made similar remarks in his ‘Round Robin’, and it was clear that neither thought Fry’s social mission credible.98 Reed’s defence of Fry, citing the chronology of his work and its variable tenor, would not alter the fact that contemporaries like Hulme, one suspects, would pinpoint Fry’s true colours in his ‘Art and Life’ essay, rather than in ‘Art and the Great Society’.99 Even conceding Fry’s open-mindedness, we see how his comments on the relation of art to life, whether in 1912 or in 1917, set him apart from Hulme. The latter began his political project by going directly to sources in French conservatism, while Fry only picked out the echoes of these ideas as related to pictorial style. Later, Hulme found in Worringer the direct source and confirmation of a fundamental shift in European culture. While the Maurrasian Denis hinted at a localized, and temporally lesser, shift, in France, back to the classicism of the Capetian regime, Worringer described a much larger narrative about Western civilization. Fry adopted neither the local politics of the Maurrasian Denis nor the pan-continental epochal shift posited by Worringer. Indeed, while advocating the classical revival, he stood, unsuccessfully, as a Liberal MP in the 1910 election.100 In Hulme’s view, Fry’s Post-Impressionist revolution appropriated the slogans of a continental revolution as signifiers of their own gentle aesthetic revival, compatible with a liberal humanist ethic, and an ineffectual echo of the Arts and Crafts movement. The result is a ‘revolution in

Varieties of Abstraction

159

art’ that is only tenuously connected to political history. It was also a revolution reserved for an elite avant-garde. Alongside this resistance to the political subtext of classicism was a resistance to the more radical formalism that was associated with it. This problem became apparent in the quality of the works of art being produced by the Grafton Group, something that Hulme clearly registered. Analytical cubism was too extreme a step for Fry, as were other radical forms of abstraction.

Walter Sickert, Charles Ginner and the Camden Town Group Hulme had shown an appreciation for Sickert’s brand of impressionism. The frozen images of fleeting urban life that Hulme recommended in ‘Notes on Language and Style’ are very reminiscent of Sickert’s paintings of city scenes and are conceived on a similar principle, as David Peters Corbett has shown.101 Hulme made explicit his admiration for Sickert’s teacher, Whistler, in his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, in which he calls for an ‘impressionism’ in verse to match ‘impressionism’ in art.102 It was Sickert who used the term ‘impressionism’ to refer to his own work and that of his allies within the New English Art Club, who exhibited in 1889 as the ‘London Impressionists’.103 Alan Robinson is right to identify Sickert’s ‘impressionism’ and Hulme’s early literary theory as stages in the development of an ‘empathetic’ aesthetic.104 Moreover, Sickert is cited directly in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ (1911), where Hulme clearly identifies the painter as exemplary of the intuitive, empathetic art recommended by Bergson in Le Rire.105 The younger painters of the Camden Town Group were attracted by some elements of Post-Impressionism – which they had imbibed independently of Fry on trips to Europe before 1910. But the prominence of these artworks following Fry’s exhibitions clearly reinforced their enthusiasm. Partly, this reflected social links with Bloomsbury and with the group forming around Lewis. A Slade contemporary of Gore and Gilman, Lewis was invited to join the Camden Town Group in 1911, showing work in the cubist style at their early exhibitions. In 1912 he worked with Gore and Ginner on designs for the Cabaret Theatre Club in Soho. By this time, the younger Camden Town painters were breaking away from Sickert’s influence, and their decoration of the nightclub’s walls reflected the impact of Fry’s Post-Impressionism. Later that year, Gore began painting landscapes in a semi-abstract style. In the same period, he was attending Hulme’s Frith Street salon, and Ysanne Holt speculates that Gore’s ‘meditative,

160

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

empathetic contemplation of the essential spirit of a scene’, in part, reflected Hulme’s Bergsonian discourse.106 At the same time, Sickert was detecting his colleagues’ movement towards abstraction and would castigate Gilman on his use of colour and Ginner on the thickness of his painting.107 In 1913, the Camden Town Group lost access to their customary exhibiting space at the Carfax Gallery, and at the same time, Lewis quarrelled with Fry and left the Omega Workshop with his supporters in tow.108 Both groups needed to re-establish themselves and the result was the merging of Lewis’s faction with Sickert’s circle to create the London Group. The main players in achieving this were Gilman, Gore, Ginner, Lewis, Epstein – and Hulme, who hosted their discussions at Frith Street.109 Sickert’s estrangement subsequently grew more definite. Lewis had never been popular with the senior figures in the Camden Town Group, especially with Lucien Pissaro. Despite giving a speech to support the new group’s first exhibition at the Brighton Art Gallery, Sickert privately expressed doubts, particularly about the inclusion of Lewis and Epstein. Indeed, the aesthetic divide between the Camden Town and ‘Cubist’ groups was clear at Brighton – their work was split between two rooms, and the exhibition catalogue included two introductions, one by Pissarro’s protégé Manson and the other by Lewis. Fry described the union as a friendship between ‘two quite separate organisms’.110 Indeed, despite the friendliness of the younger painters of either camp, they soon engaged in public dispute, albeit in relatively friendly terms, when Ginner set out his ‘Neo-Realist’ manifesto, published by the New Age.111 Hulme criticized Ginner’s position in the second of his ‘Modern Art’ article series in February 1914. Reading Hulme’s rejoinder, far more moderate in tone than his articles on Ludovici and Fry, we might bear in mind his liking of impressionism of the Whistlerian, Sickertian type in his early notebooks and lectures on poetry and art before 1912. His discussion of Neo-Realism in 1914 captures not only the alteration in his position since writing those texts, but also, I argue, the continuity of his thinking between them. To use another metaphor, he had switched his battle from one front to another but was fighting the same war; his motivation remained consistent. Ginner argued that the ‘Cubist Room’ painters were falling into a bad habit of ‘academicism’, that is, an excessive reliance on ‘formulae’ identified in the work of a ‘master’, for example, Cézanne. They failed to root their art, as Cézanne had, in observed natural phenomena. Such first-hand experience, Ginner argued, must be the source and point of departure for all sincere, expressive painting. Hulme analyses Ginner’s argument as follows:

Varieties of Abstraction

161

(1) All good art is realistic. Academism is the result of the adoption by weak painters of the creative artist’s personal method of interpreting nature, and the consequent creation of formulae, without contact with nature. (2) The new movement in art is merely an academic movement of the kind, springing from the conversion of Cezanne’s mannerisms into formulae. (3) The only remedy is a return to realism. Only a realistic method can keep art creative and vital.112

He concludes, ‘These statements are based on such an extraordinarily confused and complicated mass of assumptions that I cannot give any proper refutation.’ Hulme’s point is that Cubism did not use formulae, but abstractions. ‘Both are “unlike nature”, but while the one is unlike, owing to a lack of vitality in the art, resulting in dead conventions, the other is unlike, of deliberate intent, and is very far from being dead.’ Ginner’s point about formulae is true of realistic art, Hulme concedes – but his mistake is in believing that this is the only kind of art. The position of abstraction is quite a different one. The abstractions used in this other art will not bring about a decadence, they are an essential part of its method. Their almost geometrical and non-vital characters is not the result of weakness and lack of vitality in the art. They are not dead conventions, but the product of a creative process just as active as that in any realist art.113

Art might be generated from two separate poles, Hulme argues: one of which he labels ‘nature’ and the other ‘abstraction’. Ginner wrongly assumes that all art begins with the observation of nature, and the further removed it becomes from nature, the more ‘formulaic’ it becomes. Ginner’s argument against visual ‘formulae’ had much in common with Hulme’s in ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’.114 In his response, Hulme makes clear how his position has changed. The notion that all art must remain rooted in the observation of nature, he says, overlooks forms of creative thinking that have become abstracted and disconnected from life. Seeking an analogy for visual abstraction ‘in ordinary thought’, he notes how ‘the reasoning activity is quite different in character from any succession of images drawn from the senses, but yet thought itself would be impossible without this sensual stimulus’. This distinction is clearly Bergsonian, but Hulme claims to prefer an aesthetic rooted in the conceptual realm instead of the vital. However, his argument is not consistent. Despite insisting on the ultimate purity of abstract form, he concedes that the artist continues to find subject matter initially in the flux of the natural world. Although he seeks to deny the artist’s reliance on nature, his thinking militates against him. It becomes clear that the artist’s vision, although now openly geometrizing, requires the fuel of sense impressions to develop its

162

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

abstractions. His argument against Ginner falters somewhat in this admission: ‘There must be just as much contact with nature in an abstract art as in a realistic one; without that stimulus the artist could produce nothing.’115 Hulme’s art criticism repeatedly wrestles with this problem of the abstract artist’s relationship with nature, and his arguments do not achieve clarity. While contradictions in his other journalism seem to resolve themselves, this stumbling block in his treatment of art is a glaring one. We can, however, read between the lines to discern what Rae has described as Hulme’s ‘tensional aesthetic’, one which captures immediate experience, a conjunction of external form and internal feeling, at the borderline of conceptualization.116 The painting that Hulme admired most, that of David Bomberg, is a case in point. Hulme’s concluding remark on Ginner reveals the paradoxical tension at play here, and Hulme’s apparent inability to see or resolve it. Admitting the need for a natural prompt for abstraction, Hulme insists on the redundancy of natural forms after that initial moment. Both realism and abstraction, then, can only be engendered out of nature, but while the first’s only idea of living seems to be that of hanging on to its progenitor, the second cuts its umbilical cord [my italics].117

Yet he has earlier insisted that abstract art must begin with life. He is pushing for pure abstraction and does not recognize that his own comments reveal a belief in the roots of ‘geometric art’ in immediate experience. The failure of this aesthetic distinction might shed light on the lingering camaraderie of Vorticist and Camden Town painters. In a review of the 1914 London Group exhibition, Hulme wrote appreciatively of Ginner, Gilman and Gore.118 The same note of respect was expressed by Gaudier-Brzeska in his review of the exhibition in the Egoist, and it recurs again in Lewis’s review of the second London Group exhibition the following year.119 However, if Hulme’s tone is milder, it is because he feels he is observing an outdated form of aesthetic stylization out of which his species of ‘new modern geometric art’ has sprung. His sterner critical rebukes are reserved for those within his closer circle. The Camden Town painters were no longer contenders in the race to achieve a ‘new modern geometric art’, but they remained of interest, throwbacks whose qualities he admires and whom he encourages to move in the right direction. From his position even further back in the evolutionary chain, Sickert watched on, increasingly impatient. Within a few weeks, he had attacked the London Group directly in the New Age.120 His line of attack focused on what he saw as an obsession, in work by Epstein and Lewis, with the female anatomy –

Varieties of Abstraction

163

an extraordinary choice of complaint from Sickert, in view of his ‘Camden Town Murder’ series. It was not the subject matter but its manner of depiction that offended him; Sickert captured the precise impressions of the female nude created by light and shadow in the impoverished, urban scenarios that fascinated him, adding a symbolist depth to startlingly realist subject matter. To picture the nude in mechanical or monumental form, like something carved from metal by a toolist or from ivory by a savage, was another – it removed the body too boldly from the flux of sense impressions in which Sickert found naturally occurring form. He called this treatment of the nude ‘pornometric’ – a word recalling the contemporary eugenic term ‘biometry’.121 Sickert’s attempt to capture the particular quality of his impressions in paint was, in Hulme’s analysis, similar to the use by architects of flexible ‘wooden curves’, bent to depict exact forms; Lewis and Epstein’s art, in contract, saw human forms being bent to fit metal templates. Sickert’s allusion to an on-going, Galtonian project to present human data in precise geometric form is intriguing.122 Yet despite these differences of emphasis, Sickert’s muddy images correlate powerfully with Hulme’s initial vision of a cindery, messy world, exemplified by the modern city. In 1914, the death of Gore, the intermediary who brought Camden Town and cubist painters together, prompted obituaries by Lewis and Sickert revealing their proximity, if not their resemblance, within the modernist family line.123

David Bomberg Much has been written on the relation between Hulme’s art theory and the Vorticism(s) of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Working towards a wider remit, this study can only briefly evaluate their brief and unstable alliance. It may be, however, that this very instability was closely related to tensions in Hulme’s aesthetic itself. 124 Indeed this is the suggestion of two essays, one by Patricia Rae and the other by Paul Edwards, which point to Vorticism as an example of what Rae calls a ‘tensional aesthetic’, or what Edwards describes as a fluctuating desire for, and disillusion in, truths and value beyond the sensory maelstrom of modern experience.125 Although a very broad explanation of Vorticism, this is one ‘ideal-type’ in which Hulme would fit neatly.126 The affinities between Hulme’s theory of art and Lewis’s practice certainly deserve fuller treatment.127 To Hulme’s eye in 1914, however, Lewis’s reliance on a priori form was his downfall, aligning him with the kind of abstraction, associated with Kandinsky, which had lost its foothold in representation.128 This verdict in Hulme’s review

164

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

of the first London Group exhibition implies the necessity of representational content in abstract art, although, in his simultaneous, cautious admiration of Bomberg’s ‘pure form’, he seemed to contradict himself. This double standard points to a key ambiguity in Hulme’s writings on art, and it may be that his analysis did Lewis an injustice. Indeed, it is possible that Hulme’s rejection of Vorticism was less cerebral than social in origin, since he quarrelled with Lewis over Kate Lechmere’s affections in the Spring of 1914. However, it remains true that, as Wees points out, Bomberg’s paintings conspicuously differ from Lewis’s, and it was Bomberg’s work, evidently, that most fascinated Hulme.129 In order to follow the line of Hulme’s thinking to his final position, we must move on to his last piece in the ‘Modern Art’ series, a review of Bomberg’s solo exhibition of July 1914, which expands on his comments on the artist in the London Group review four months earlier. As noted, Hulme’s first response to Bomberg seems to contradict his objection, in the same piece, to Lewis’s departure from representation: Hulme concedes that Bomberg’s work pushes the ‘heresy’ of pure form to its ‘reductio ad absurdum’ but admits a fascination with the results.130 A few months later, Bomberg declared, in the famous manifesto he issued to accompany his first exhibition, that ‘I APPEAL to a Sense of Form […]. My object is the construction of Pure Form. I reject everything in painting that is not Pure Form’.131 In fact, neither Hulme nor Bomberg was quite accurate in these statements. Although Bomberg did much to thwart recognition of his subject matter, his work was founded on representation. His method was to draw from life, often using the ‘squaring system’, the division of the canvas into a grid to enable accurate depiction of space, a method taught in drawing classes Bomberg had taken with Sickert.132 Bomberg gave the grid priority, stressing its lines until the figures beneath were nearly unrecognizable. He thus reduced his models to an extreme abstraction, while retaining a representational element. It is unclear whether Hulme knew of this method, but it seems to have been the heavily disguised subject that caught his attention, whereas Lewis’s art, tending, it seemed, towards an a priori expressivism, paled in comparison.133 It is surprising that Hulme points to Bomberg as the limit case of the Kandinsky current in abstraction, about which he had reservations, when the qualities he admired in Bomberg in fact lay in a tension between the figurative and the abstract, not, as the artist claimed, in the use of ‘pure form’. This was in fact consistent with Hulme’s earlier account of the ‘new geometric art’ which hovered between figuration and abstraction.134 Confusingly, Hulme’s last piece on art seems to approve a movement towards complete abstraction. This seems to contradict his previous remarks

Varieties of Abstraction

165

on the impossibility of pure form, prompting charges of inconsistency.135 In fact, as Cork points out, Bomberg’s paintings of this time were never purely abstract, and their titles gave them a particular meaning in time and place. It is possible to see these paintings as uniquely vivid representations of Hulme’s philosophy, whether or not he or Bomberg understood their significance. Ironically, we see Hulme failing to see the true definitional lines of his own position. One might argue that Bomberg’s abstraction was more consistent with Hulme’s long-standing ideas about both art and literature than the latter even realized. Bomberg captures organic forms at the moment of their abstraction, cinders upon which a ‘chessboard’ has been imposed, illustrating Hulme’s writing as far back as 1906. Bomberg provides Hulme with the point of departure to discuss the relevance of ‘aesthetic emotion’, paraphrasing Johannes Volkelt and reacting against Clive Bell.136 This would again seem to militate against the notion of ‘pure form’ in Bomberg’s art, but Hulme fails to register this. He seems determined to prove on the everyday occurrence of form while insisting on its purity in Bomberg’s work. His case boils down to the difficult idea that the artist, incapable of a priori abstraction, must first use representational material to achieve form. Only then may they depart from this source material, leaving their spur in the real world behind while retaining its expressive impetus.137 The position is unclear in Hulme’s writing, standing at odds with his denial of significant form, and is inconsistently expressed. It is one of the few occasions when we find Hulme contradicting himself within a single piece of writing. Cork, noting this ‘schizophrenic attitude towards abstraction’, suggests that Hulme ‘ignored’ or ‘was so obsessed with [abstraction] that he “could not see” the paintings’ subject matter, although his sympathies with Bomberg’s experiments were ‘keenly […] engaged’. This ‘confusion’ is deemed to be ‘eminently forgivable: he was, after all, feeling his way with something completely new in English art’.138 Indeed, it is perhaps the reader and viewer’s prerogative to correct a line of argument that seems to run almost true, only skewing from its path at a late, and strangely unnecessary, stage. One might guess that Hulme’s head was turned by contemporary evangelists for ‘pure form’ – not so much by Bell, but perhaps by Bomberg and members of his circle. However, Bomberg had confused matters himself by applying this term to paintings that contained important representational material, as is clear from recent, extensive readings of his paintings as products of a specific time, place and experience.139 Hulme’s argument from very early on up to his identification of Bomberg as the presenter of abstraction is coherent, up to the point when his own words seem to confound the point.

166

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Figure 2  David Bomberg, In the Hold (1913–1914). Oil on canvas, 198 × 256.5 cm. Credit: © The artist’s estate / Photo © Tate, London 2015.

It remains evident that In The Hold (Figure 2), which Hulme discussed in his review of the London Group, does have representational content, which its title acknowledges even as its style occludes. As Cork suggests, it depicts a focal point of pre-war political and social unrest in the London docks. It is surprising that critics, aware of the interest in syndicalism expressed by Pound, Lewis and Hulme, have not drawn clearer and bolder links between this phenomenon and the period’s most famous images of labourers, In the Hold and the Rock Drill.140 Bomberg’s work, in particular, calls to mind the tension in Hulme’s work between the mess of contingency and an artificial conceptual order, which, since 1911, had gained a clear political subtext. The metaphoric links between social organization and the ‘problem of universals’ in human cognitive processes are made manifest in Bomberg’s picture. We see the tense relation between complexity in immediate experience and simplicity in abstract cognition. In the face of an infinitely complex flux of sense impressions, the artist is drawn towards rigid lines and stripped down forms, rendering a tension between the earthly and conceptual reminiscent of that between the individual and the state,

Varieties of Abstraction

167

the worker and an alienating capitalism. The painting captures a tension in philosophy detected by Hulme not only in discussions of language and poetry, art and the politics of the art world, but also in crowd psychology and mass politics – an application that would come to the fore in his translation of Sorel. Just as the painting represents this cognitive problem, similar tensions emerge in Hulme’s struggle to put its visual effect into words. One strategy in his critical response was the differentiation of schools within schools, factions and sub-factions. Struggling to make such distinctions, to locate Bomberg among his contemporaries, Hulme’s criticism enacts the same battle between complex experience and conceptual classification, recalling the political struggle to assimilate individuals, without diminution, within a social whole.141 Ultimately, Bomberg’s choice of subject matter cuts to the quick, beneath these ‘rhetorical affinities’.142 Whether consciously or not, he depicts, beneath layers of abstraction, the political drama that the art world was mimicking – the question of how to organize men into abstract forms, of how to marshal labourers and populations into functional unity, without stripping them of distinguishing features. Rae argues that at the bottom of Bomberg’s art (and, she claims, of Vorticism as a whole) lies a fundamental philosophical problem, a ‘tension’ between concepts and experience.143 This was what the art and the political debate had in common: the common denominator being the problem of the one and the many. The Jamesian word ‘pluralism’, as discussed above, was applicable not only to philosophy, but to the political notion of a decentralized society – something roughly akin to syndicalism. Cork suggests that In The Hold is comparable, in its depiction of this conundrum, to Ford Madox Brown’s similar meditation on the significance and varieties of labour, Work (1852–1865).144 As noted above, Bomberg trained for a time with Walter Sickert, whose paintings also selected realist subject matter on formal, aesthetic grounds.145 The relationship between Hulme’s earlier appreciation of Sickert and his liking for Bomberg’s work is evident in ‘Modern Art IV’, in a note on Bomberg’s development. Of the pictures shown at the Chenil Gallery, Hulme highlights a very early canvas, a ‘bedroom picture’ (depicting Bomberg’s sister looking from a window of their family home) as an example of the artist’s point of departure. As Hulme notes, it is painted according to ‘Sickert’s ideas about paint’, but with an ‘insistency on shape’, particularly in the human form, which, Hulme believed, was signalling the movement towards abstraction.146 He understood that Sickert and Bomberg were working on a spectrum of abstraction, one upon which we can see Hulme’s critical preference moving over time. Elements of Sickert’s practice are retained in Bomberg’s most experimental work: In the Hold is one

168

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

prominent case in which the ‘squaring’ method is crucial to the design. Bomberg required subjects taken from life to develop into abstract formalism, just as Sickert refined aesthetic qualities from images sketched rapidly on the street.147 However, Bomberg took Sickert’s method to an extreme, imposing a new formal structure to subdue the complex, mobile forms with which he began.148 In his review of Bomberg’s Chenil Gallery exhibition, Hulme devotes some space to the painting The Mud Bath (Figure 3) and a set of three preliminary drawings Bomberg chose to show, which revealed the development of the painting’s design. Bomberg evidently thought these drawings were interesting in their own right, and indeed, they show the process of abstraction under way. For Hulme, they confirmed the suspicion that Bomberg had developed a formalism all of his own, based on the refinement of representative content. They trace the removal of what Bomberg called ‘irrelevant matter’.149 Hulme’s interest was caught. It is worth expanding a little on why this was, and how the painting confirmed and dramatized many of the ideas Hulme had been developing for several years. It seems likely that the title and the subject of the painting were symbolic, in the artist’s mind, of the process of abstraction. As Richard Cork has noted, the place that Bomberg had painted from life was no mud bath, but Schevzik’s

Figure 3  David Bomberg, The Mud Bath (1914). Oil on canvas, 152.5 × 224 cm. Credit: © The artist’s estate / Photo © Tate, London 2015.

Varieties of Abstraction

169

Vapour Baths, Whitechapel, used by the East End Jewish community.150 Like his teacher Sickert, Bomberg chose scenes of urban realism. The influence is apparent not only in the choice of subject matter, but also in the emphasis of form. However, Bomberg’s use of abstraction and colour clearly go far beyond Sickert’s practice. His chosen title recalls, perhaps intentionally, a well-known criticism of Sickert’s work by Harold Gilman, who, following the expansion of the Camden Town Group into the London Group, presided over the new body during the first exhibition of Spring 1914. Sickert by this time had resigned his membership. The new president, though still influenced by Sickert in his subject matter, led the way in rejecting the latter’s choice of palette, which Gilman described as ‘muddy’. Indeed, Sickert’s paintings of the time employed a dull range of colours, exemplified by the particularly dark masterpiece Noctes Ambrosianae (1906). Ginner recalled how Gilman ‘was still influenced by Sickert, but a somewhat higher key of colour was creeping in and he was beginning to expound his contempt for “mud” as he termed it, in painting’.151 It seems likely that in the small London art world, Gilman’s epithet for Sickert’s palette was known to his contemporaries. Bomberg too had worked in Sickert’s style early in his career, but his later work seems to react against it.152 The Mud Bath presents similar subject matter to a Sickert painting but, by pushing the use of form and colour to an extreme, gives the subject matter a rigorous dousing, removing ‘unnecessary matter’, and clearing the mud that, in a Camden Town painting, would have occluded the forms beneath. Several levels of interpretation of The Mud Bath are suggested by Cork: his suggestion that the work is a ‘prophetic’ image of war particularly chimes with aspects of Hulme’s writing. For Hulme, as we shall see, the analogy between the muddiness of contingency and the cleanliness of order in abstract art was directly transferable to his analysis of the Western Front. The latter’s notebooks from the front would record his strong sense of the lapsing of man-made order, despite their best efforts to maintain structure and system – here, the clean vapour of abstraction could not control the chaos of the front. Cork notes one of Bomberg’s final touches to the painting: to render the water in bright red, something absent from his preliminary studies in crayon and gouache.153 The vapour bath, presented as a ‘Mud Bath’, appears as a blood bath. A sense of frozen motion extends from the figures to the entire canvas: the khaki edges of the bloody rectangle could have been abruptly excavated by a bombshell. The vertical black/brown stripe resembles a descending missile, inhumanly definite among broken organic forms, pushing the lines of the red trapezoid outwards

170

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

from its point of impact. Suddenly submerged or dismembered figures float and writhe in the redness, as if trying to haul themselves out, while figures on the mud bank tumble or raise their hands in horror, anticipating Picasso’s Guernica (1937). The scene recalls Bomberg’s paintings Vision of Ezekiel (1912), in which the bodies of the dead lift themselves out of the ground, and Family Bereavement (1913), in which gestures of grief are captured as cool geometric shapes.154 Bomberg’s one-man exhibition was one of the events marking the high tide of British abstract art. The beginning of the rappel à l’ordre ironically involved a withdrawal from abstract order in favour of complicated contingency. Work as a war artist forced Bomberg’s ‘eye’ back into ‘the mud’: his inability to subdue images of the Western Front to his ‘bath’ of abstract form, and its cleansing removal of ‘irrelevant matter’, coincided with Hulme’s death and the end of his project to cultivate forms of art that balanced a confrontation with chaos with a redemptive order.155 The tensions between categories of nominalism/realism, representation/abstraction and mud/cleanliness that recur through the modern art debate seem to reflect and respond to the domestic and international crises of the time. Bomberg’s In The Hold and The Mud Bath present two of the closest visual accompaniments to Hulme’s explicit discussions of painting, political philosophy and war as illustrations of the human struggle to impose order upon a chaotic universe.

Notes 1

2

On developments in French art, see John Rewald, Post-Impressionism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978); John House and Mary Anne Stevens (eds), PostImpressionism (London: Royal Academy of Arts/Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1979–1980); and Christopher Green, Art in France, 1900–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press/London: Pelican History of Art, 2000). On the reception of Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition, see J. B. Bullen, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Post-Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 1–38 (pp. 1–24); and Anna Gruetzner Robins, Modern Art in Britain, 1910–1914 (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), pp. 15–45. As late as April 1911, a postcard from Hulme to his sister from Assisi extolled the work of Giotto as the starting point of modern Western art (a notion that Fry had by then crucially challenged). See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 93. Roger Fry, ‘The Last Phase of Impressionism’, Burlington Magazine, 12.60 (March 1908), pp. 374–76; repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. by Christopher Reed (Chicago:

Varieties of Abstraction

171

University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 72–75. Hulme’s familiarity with this conventional wisdom, together with his appreciation of Whistler, Sickert, and Berenson, reflects what Rebecca Beasley describes as ‘a well-informed and up-todate knowledge of art, if not a particularly distinctive taste’. ‘ “A Definite Meaning”: T. E. Hulme’s Art Criticism’, in T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, pp. 57–72 (pp. 62–63). 3 Hulme recalls seeing the Post-Impressionist exhibition and afterwards reading Maurice Denis’s account of the new art. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (1912), CW, pp. 59–73 (p. 65). 4 See Bullen, ‘Introduction’, pp. 32–35; Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 92–101, 102–31, 132–44. 5 Bullen, for example, registers Hulme’s importance by including the second of his New Age reviews in the concluding section of the anthology Post-Impressionists in England, pp. 476–81. 6 ‘The motive of all writing and all invention of ideas would seem merely to be that of drawing a complicated line which shall definitely mark one off from the type of people one can’t stand’. ‘Bergson Lecturing’, pp. 15–16; CW, p. 157. 7 Levenson, Genealogy, pp. 98–101. 8 Csengeri, ‘Introduction’, CW, p. xxxiii, n. 17. 9 For Hulme’s avowal of ‘pluralism’, see ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’, p. 608; CW, p. 108. 10 Having analysed Epstein’s work in Worringer’s terms, Hulme argues that ‘the genius and sincerity of an artist lies in extracting afresh, from outside reality, a new means of expression. It seems curious that the people who in poetry abominate cliché and know that Nature, as it were, presses in on the poet to be used as metaphor, cannot understand the same thing when it occurs plastically. They seem unable to understand that an artist who has something to say will continually “extract” from reality new methods of expression, and that these being personally felt will inevitably lack prettiness and will differ from traditional cliches’. T. E. Hulme, ‘Mr. Epstein and the Critics’, NA, 14.8 (25 November 1913), 251–53 (252); CW, pp. 254–62 (pp. 258–59). 11 See ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, CW, pp. 271–76, for a précis of Worringer on empathetic art. 12 Paul Edwards, ed., ‘ “You Must Speak with Two Tongues”: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Aesthetics and Literature’, in Blast: Vorticism 1914–1918 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 113–20 (p. 113). 13 For example, Frank Rutter dedicated his influential account of Post-Impressionism ‘To Rebels of either sex all the world over who in any way are fighting for freedom of any kind I dedicate this study of their painter-comrades’. Revolution in Art (London: The Art News Press, 1910), p. 14. Numerous other, more hostile,

172

14

15 16

17 18 19

20

21

22

23

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism commentators drew the same connection. See Bullen, Post-Impressionists in England for many further examples, pp. 14–15, 17, 23. W. C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972) led the way in adapting the argument of Dangerfield in Strange Death, p. 4. Hallberg, ‘Libertarian Imagism’, pp. 63–79; Kadlec, ‘Pound, BLAST, and Syndicalism’, pp. 1015–31; Fernihough, ‘Go in Fear of Abstractions’, pp. 479–97. See Beasley, Ezra Pound and Visual Culture, pp. 8–9, 81–109. Other critics have discussed Pound’s relations with Marsden in terms of his Imagist aesthetic, as noted in Chapter 3. For example, see Thacker, ‘Dora Marsden and The Egoist’, pp. 179–96; and Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, pp. 54–89. Ezra Pound, ‘Status Rerum’, Poetry, 1.4 (January 1913), 123–27 (126). Ezra Pound, ‘Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist’, Egoist, 1.6 (15 August 1914), 306–07 (306). Wyndham Lewis, ‘Long Live the Vortex!’ Blast, 1 (20 June 1914), 7; repr. in Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913–1956, ed. by Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), pp. 25–27 (p. 26). Contrast, for example, Pound’s identification of Imagism with Vorticism in ‘Vortex: Pound’, Blast, 1 (20 June 1914), 153–54 (154) with Lewis’s later comments: ‘imagism was a literary movement, having no relation to vorticism, nor anything in common with it’. Letter to the editor, Partisan Review, April 1949 (perhaps not sent), Louis F. Ferguson, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. by W. K. Rose (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 492; and that ‘Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period’. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Introduction’, in Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1956), pp. 3–4 (p. 3); repr. as ‘The 1956 Retrospective at the Tate Gallery’, in Wyndham Lewis on Art, pp. 451–53 (p. 451). See Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Most recently, see Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake for an account of how scientific metaphors entered literary writing and vice versa. For treatments of scientific language in Imagist and Vorticist writing, see Ian F. A. Bell, Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (London: Methuen, 1981); Martin Kayman, The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1986); Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See Peter J. Bowler, Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 182–226. Roger Fry, ‘Two Views of the London Group: Part One’, The Nation (14 March 1914), 998–99 (p. 998); repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 163–66 (p. 163).

Varieties of Abstraction

173

‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, CW, pp. 281–82. Pound, ‘Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist’, p. 306. Ezra Pound, ‘A Study in French Poets’, Little Review, 4.10 (February 1918), 55. Hulme argues that human nature is fixed, but, like Bergson (L’Évolution créatrice, p. 26; Creative Evolution, pp. 24, 63), he accepts the premise of mutation in the form presented by Hugo De Vries. This allows Hulme to argue for the constancy of the human race while accepting the truth of evolution. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, CW, p. 61; ‘Theory and Practice II’, Commentator, 3 (15 November 1911), 404–05 (405); CW, p. 226–31 (p. 230); ‘A Tory Philosophy V’, pp. 388–89; CW, pp. 242–43. 28 Herbert Schneidau, ‘Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound’, Modern Philology, 65.3 (February 1968), 214–27 (227). 29 See Milburn, The ‘Deutschlandbild’ of A. R. Orage and the ‘New Age’ Circle, pp. 48–59, 73–101, 113–60. 30 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937), p. 4. 31 Ezra Pound, ‘The New Sculpture’, The Egoist, 1.4 (16 February 1914), 68. 32 Letter from F. S. Flint to Ezra Pound, in Christopher Middleton, ‘Documents on Imagism from the Papers of F. S. Flint’, The Review, 15 (April 1965), 31–51. 33 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 4. 34 ‘Bergson Lecturing’, pp. 15–16; CW, p. 157; North Staffs [T. E. Hulme], ‘War Notes I’, NA, 18.2 (11 November 1915), 29–30 (29); CW, pp. 331–37 (pp. 332–33). 35 See Laura Otis on martial/biological metaphors in Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 36 Patricia Rae, ‘From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game: Representations of Truth in Vorticist Art’, ELH, 56.3 (1989), 689–720 (689–97, 712, 719 n. 68). 37 For a history of this group, see Wendy Baron, The Camden Town Group (London: Scolar, 1979), pp. 3–76; repr. rev. edn as Perfect Moderns (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 15–81; and Denys Wilcox, The London Group, 1913-1939: The Artists and Their Works (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 1–31, esp. pp. 1–14. 38 See Jacqueline Falkenheim, Roger Fry and the Beginnings of Formalist Art Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), pp. 3–14, 15–32, 87–110; Reed’s introductory notes in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 1–5, 7–11, 48–60, 117–32; Christopher Green, ed., Art Made Modern (London: Courtauld Institute, 2000), pp. 13–30; and Adrianne Rubin, ‘This Difficult and Uncertain Science: Roger Fry’s Interpretation of Aesthetic Perception’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2006), pp. 10–45, 46–93, 94–156. 39 Fry, ‘The Last Phase of Impressionism’, pp. 374–76 (p. 375); repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 72–75 (p. 73). 40 ‘The fullness and completeness of the imaginative life […] may correspond to an existence more real and more important than any that we know in mortal life.’ 24 25 26 27

174

41

42 43 44

45

46 47

48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, New Quarterly, 2 (April 1909), 171–90; repr. in Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920), pp. 11–25 (pp. 14–15). Roger Fry, ‘The French Group’, The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, exh. cat. (London: Grafton Gallery, 1912), repr. as ‘The French Post-Impressionists’ in Vision and Design, pp. 156–59 (pp. 158–59). See also ‘Blake and British Art’, The Nation, (7 February 1914), pp. 791–92; repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 154–57 (p. 156). ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, CW, pp. 191–204; ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, CW, pp. 59–73. Maurice Denis, ‘Cézanne I-II’, trans. by Roger Fry in Burlington Magazine, 16.82 (January 1910), 207–19; 16.83 (February 1910), 275–80. Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilisation of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 88–91, 97–98; Katherine Kuenzli, ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Politics in the Age of Dreyfus: Maurice Denis’s Homage to Cézanne’, Art History, 30.5 (November 2007), 683–711. Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 125–42, 143–54, 177; Roger Fry, ‘The Post-Impressionists – II’, The Nation (3 December 1910), 402–03 (402); repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 90–94 (p. 91). Benedict Nicolson, ‘Post-Impressionism and Roger Fry’, Burlington Magazine, 93 (January 1951), 10–15 (12–13, 14–15). John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976), pp. 26–27. Quentin Bell and Stephen Chaplin, ‘The Ideal Home Rumpus’, Apollo, 80 (October 1964), 284–91; Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis, Paintings and Drawings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), pp. 64–68; Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art, I, 85–98; and Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984), pp. 54–57. See Robert Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 33–95; and Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, for discussions of these debates within the New Age, and within wider periodical and social networks. See Anna Gruetzner Robins, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Sickert: Complete Writings on Art, ed. by Anna Gruetzner Robins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. xxvii–xxxvi. ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, CW, p. 53. ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, CW, p. 199. ‘Plan for a Book on Modern Theories of Art’, Speculations, pp. 261–64. ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, CW, pp. 272, 273, 269, 273–75. This piece is held in the Tate Gallery archive. T. E. Hulme, ‘Jacob Epstein at the 21 Gallery’ [December 1913], Tate Archive TGA 8135/35. Anthony Ludovici, ‘Art: The Carfax, the Suffolk Street, and the Twenty-One Galleries’, NA, 14.7 (18 December 1913), 213–15 (215).

Varieties of Abstraction

175

56 ‘Mr. Epstein and the Critics’, pp. 251, 252, 253, 252; CW, pp. 256, 257–58, 259, 260–61, 260. 57 Arthur E. Hight, ‘Art’, NA, 14.10 (8 January 1914), 319–26; Douglas Fox Pitt, ‘Mr. Epstein and His Work’, NA, 14.10 (8 January 1914), 319; J.A.M.A., ‘Letter to the Editor,’ NA, 14.12 (22 January 1914), 382; and Arthur Rose, ‘Letter to the Editor’, NA, 14.12 (22 January 1914), 382. 58 Anthony Ludovici, ‘Art: An Open Letter to My Friends’, NA, 14.9 (1 January 1914), 278–81; Wyndham Lewis, ‘Epstein and His Critics, or Nietzsche and His Friends’, NA, 14.10 (8 January 1914), 319; and Wyndham Lewis, ‘Mr. Arthur Rose’s Offer’, NA, 14.15 (12 February 1914), 479. 59 Hastings may have been responsible for the satirical poem published by Arifiglio, ‘Canzone Cubico,’ NA, 14.15 (12 February 1914), 472. 60 See T. K. L. [Beatrice Hastings], ‘All Except Anything,’ NA, 13.25 (16 October 1913), 733. See also ‘The Way Back to America,’ NA, 13.21 (18 September 1913), 604–05; ‘The Clear Tongue plus Pindarism,’ NA, 13.22 (25 September 1913), 636–37; ‘Humanitism and the New Form,’ NA, 13.23 (2 October 1913), 669–70; ‘Aristophanes or Tailharde?,’ NA, 13.2 (4 October 1913), 702–03. See for example, ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 14.10 (8 January 1914), 306–08 (307). Orage commented frequently on Pound, Lewis and Vorticism. See ‘Readers and Writers,’ NA, 14.2 (13 November 1913), 51; 14.10 (8 January 1914), 307; 15.10 (9 July 1914), 229; 15.11 (16 July 1914), 253; 15.19 (10 September 1914), 449; 16.13 (28 January 1915), 346; 16.19 (11 March 1915), 509; 17.14 (5 August 1914), 332. For a fuller account of the various responses, see Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, pp. 143–69 (pp. 49–152 on the Epstein controversy). Rebecca Beasley also comments on this debate in Ezra Pound and Visual Culture, pp. 94–101. 61 ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 14.10 (8 January 1914), 306–08 (307). 62 Ibid., p. 307. 63 On elitism, see Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses, pp. 3–92; on paranoia, see David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 3, 5, 15–48, 220–49, 242, 293–95, 297, 339. 64 ‘Epstein and the Critics’, p. 252; CW, p. 259. 65 For Kennedy’s review, see NA, 9.15 (10 August 1911), 350–51. 66 Anthony Ludovici, Nietzsche and Art (London: Constable, 1911), p. 107. 67 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1907), trans. by Michael Bullock. 1953; (Chicago: Elephant Books, 1997), p. 16. 68 ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, CW, p. 277. 69 Ibid., pp. 16–18. 70 Ludovici, Nietzsche and Art, pp. 66–90, esp. pp. 80–81; Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, pp. 17–18. 71 Ibid., pp. 136–45.

176

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

72 See Stephanie Barron, ‘1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany’, in ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. by Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), pp. 9–24; Neil H. Donahue, ‘From Worringer to Baudrillard and Back: Ancient Americans and (Post)Modern. Culture in Weimar Germany’, in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. by Neil H. Donahue (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 135–55 (pp. 146–47). 73 Jacob Epstein describes the figure as a ‘machine-like robot’ in Let There Be Sculpture (London: Michael Joseph, 1940), p. 70; later expanded as Jacob Epstein: An Autobiography, p. 56. He recalls its inspiration and prophetic significance in The Sculptor Speaks: Jacob Epstein to Arnold L. Haskell. A Series of Conversations on Art (London: Heinemann, 1931), p. 45. Richard Cork, ‘Jacob Epstein and the Significance of the Rock Drill’ (Lecture delivered at the Royal Academy, 13 November 2009); accessed on-line at http://static.royalacademy.org.uk/files/rockdrill-613.mp3. 74 Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Play in Three Acts and an Epilogue, translated from the Czech by Paul Selver and adapted for the English stage by Nigel Playfair (London: Oxford University Press, 1923). 75 David Bomberg, draft of unsent letter to William Roberts, 1957; quoted by Richard Cork in Vorticism and Abstract Art, II, p. 476. Epstein, in a 1931 interview with Arnold L. Haskell, similarly remarked that ‘[Rock Drill] is a thing prophetic of much in the great war […] within the experience of all […] with definite human associations’ (The Sculptor Speaks: Jacob Epstein to Arnold L. Haskell. A Series of Conversations on Art (London: Heinemann, 1931), p. 45). 76 Epstein, Let There Be Sculpture, and Jacob Epstein: An Autobiography (London: Hulton Press, 1955), p. 56. 77 Cork, ‘Jacob Epstein and the Significance of the Rock Drill’; Cork writes at length about the Rock Drill in Vorticism and Abstract Art, II, pp. 454–82; in ‘Rock Drill’, in Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1987), pp. 160–71; in ‘Vorticism and Sculpture’, in Blast Vorticism 1914–1918, ed. by Paul Edwards (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 40–58; and in Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill (London: Royal Academy, 2009), pp. 160–78. Evelyn Silber discusses it in The Sculpture of Jacob Epstein (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), pp. 31–33. See Bob Holton, British Syndicalism 1900-1914: Myths and Realities (London: Pluto Press, 1976), pp. 27–88 for an account of Tom Mann’s role in stoking the ‘Great Labour Unrest’, partly under the influence of French syndicalism. See pp. 111–21 for detailed account of the 1912 miner’s strike. 78 The tool, lowered to impact on raw material, suggests not only the worker’s industry, but also, given its resemblance to a lowered gun, his deference to the viewer. However, the implement, the means of production in the hands of the worker, might be raised at any moment in confrontation.

Varieties of Abstraction

177

79 Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art, II, p. 472. Silber makes a similar observation in The Sculpture of Jacob Epstein, p. 32. 80 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Aphorism 763’, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (London: T.N. Foulis, 1909–1913), XV, The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values, II (1910), trans. by Anthony Ludovici, 208–09. Quoted by Orage in ‘Readers and Writers,’ NA, 14.12 (22 January 1914), p. 370. 81 ‘Readers and Writers,’ NA, 14.12 (22 January 1914), p. 370. 82 Anthony M. Ludovici, ‘Nietzsche and the National Guild System,’ NA, 14.14 (5 February 1914), 445. 83 ‘Nietzsche, Culture and Plutocracy,’ NA, 14.14 (5 February 1914), pp. 445–46. 84 Orage, Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism, p. 44. 85 Silber, The Sculpture of Jacob Epstein, pp. 11, 13, 20–22. Epstein told Arnold Haskell that, as well as prophesying the war, the sculpture reflects ‘a conception of a thing I knew well in New York […] and it is my feeling of that thing as a living entity, translated into terms of sculpture’, The Sculptor Speaks, p. 45. 86 On Epstein and Gill’s friendship, see Richard Cork, Wild Thing: Epstein, GaudierBrzeska, Gill (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009), pp. 19–41; and Fiona McCarthy, Eric Gill (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), pp. 102–04, 108–09. 87 McCarthy tells how Gill ‘recognized Orage as a kindred spirit’ (p. 91). He wrote an obituary note, recalling how ‘we worked together on the Fabian arts group […] to deprive Fabianism of its webbed feet – vain efforts […]. We had intimate friends in common, common enthusiasms, common appetites for earth and heaven. Then we drifted apart – he to Fontainebleau, I to Rome’. New English Weekly, 6.5 (15 November 1934), 116. Hulme similarly was moving towards a Pascalian ‘religious attitude’, if not towards Rome: this was his chosen ‘great order in life’. See Chapter 6. 88 Orage records his efforts with S. G. Hobson to reconcile Arthur Penty’s medieval ‘gild’ idea with industrialization in ‘An Editor’s Progress: Part I’, The Commonweal (10 February 1926), 376–79 (pp. 377–79); repr. as ‘An Editor’s Progress: Part I – The New Age II’, NA, 38.21 (25 March 1926), 246–47 (p. 246). Cork speculates that it was inspired by Epstein’s experiences while collecting stone from quarries, where he would have witnessed such machines in action. See Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art, II, pp. 466–67. 89 Cork remarks ‘the fact that Epstein had previously executed his own self-portrait [‘Portrait of the Artist in a Storm Cap’ (c. 1912)] wearing a similar driller’s cap suggests the presence of another meaning, this time concerned with the idea of the sculptor himself as a potentially destructive agent’. Vorticism and Abstract Art, II, p. 473. 90 The letter is reprinted in Bell and Chaplin, ‘The Ideal Home Rumpus’, pp. 284–91. 91 ‘Modern Art I’, p. 341; CW, p. 264.

178

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

92 Ibid., pp. 341, 342; CW, pp. 266, 267. 93 ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, CW, pp. 59–73 (p. 65). 94 See Maurice Denis, ‘Cézanne I-II’, 16.82 (January 1910), 207–19; 16.83 (Feb 1910), 275–80. Shiff, Cezanne and the End of Impressionism, pp. 132, 133, 135–37, 144, 177. 95 ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, CW, p. 270. 96 Fry did not call himself a socialist. However, he was clearly influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement. Frances Spalding records his friendship with Ashbee and Carpenter in Roger Fry: Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 24. Reed emphasizes Fry’s Ruskinian leanings in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 175–86. 97 ‘Modern Art I’, p. 342; CW, p. 267. 98 Bell and Chaplin, ‘The Ideal Home Rumpus’, pp. 284–91. 99 Reed, ‘Introduction’, and ‘Architecture and the Decorative Arts’, in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 1–2, 167–69, 175–86, 187 n.9. 100 Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life, p. 130. 101 David Peters Corbett’s account of Sickert’s response to the city recalls Hulme’s references to the urban experience to illustrate how the ‘chess board’ sat upon a ‘cinder heap’. See ‘ “Gross Material Facts”: Sexuality, Identity and the City in Walter Sickert, 1905-1910,’ Art History, 21 (1998), 45–64 (45–46); David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 189–200 (pp. 189–91). 102 ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’, CW, p. 53. 103 See Anna Gruetzner Robins, ‘The London Impressionists at the Goupil Gallery’, in Impressionism in Britain, ed. by Kenneth McConkey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 87–96. 104 Robinson, Poetry, Painting, and Ideas, pp. 15–18, 29–40, 58–80. 105 ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, CW, p. 199. 106 Ysanne Holt, ‘An Ideal Modernity: Spencer Gore at Letchworth’, Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–1940, ed. by David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 91–113 (p. 96). 107 This disagreement culminated in Sickert making a sidelong attack on Gilman and Ginner’s painting style in his review article ‘The New English Art Club’, NA, 15.5 (4 June 1914), 114–15 (115); Robins, Complete Writings on Art, pp. 374–75 (p. 375), prompting an exchange of badtempered articles in Summer 1914 (by which time Sickert cut an isolated figure, estranged from his former protégés. See Harold Gilman, ‘The Worst Critic in London’, NA, 15.6 (11 June 1914), 143; Walter Sickert, ‘The Thickest Painters in London’, NA, 15.7 (18 June 1914), 155; Harold Gilman, ‘Sickert

Varieties of Abstraction

179

and Neo-Realism’, NA, 15.8 (25 June 1914), 190–91; and Charles Ginner, ‘Mr. Sickert Versus “The Thickest Painters” ’, NA, 15.10 (9 July 1914), 239. 108 On the expansion of the Camden Town Group into the London Group, see Wilcox, The London Group, pp. 1–8; and Baron, Perfect Moderns, pp. 62–78. 109 Christopher Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice (London: Methuen, 1937), p. 63. 110 See Fry’s apparently magnanimous review of the first London Group exhibition, ‘Two Views of the London Group: Part One’, p. 998; A Roger Fry Reader, p. 163. 111 Charles Ginner, ‘Neo-Realism’, NA, 14.15 (12 February 1914), 467–69. 112 T. E. Hulme, ‘Modern Art II – A Preface Note and Neo-Realism’, NA, 14.15 (12 February 1914), 467–69 (467); CW, pp. 287–93 (p. 287). 113 ‘Modern Art II’, p. 467; CW, pp. 288–89. 114 ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, CW, pp. 199–200. 115 ‘Modern Art II’, p. 469; CW, pp. 292–93, 293. 116 Rae, ‘From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game’, p. 690. 117 ‘Modern Art II’, p. 469; CW, p. 293. 118 T.E. Hulme, ‘Modern Art III –The London Group’, NA, 14.21 (26 Mar 1914), 661–2 (661), CW pp. 294–8 (294). 119 Gaudier-Brzeska, ‘Allied Artists’ Association Ltd.: Holland Park Hall’, Egoist, 1.12 (15 June 1914), 227–29 (228–29). Wyndham Lewis, ‘The London Group’, Blast, 2 (July 1915), 77–79 (78); repr. in Wyndham Lewis on Art, pp. 85–90 (p. 87). 120 Walter Sickert, ‘On Swiftness’, NA, 14.21 (26 March 1914), 655–56 (655); Robins, Complete Writings on Art, pp. 346–49 (p. 348). 121 Ibid., p. 655. Robins, Complete Writings on Art, p. 348. 122 Robins suggests that Pound was the author of a satirical letter to the New Age, mocking Sickert’s complaints, which appeared soon afterwards (Arifiglio, ‘Democracy in Esse among the Art Journalists’ NA, 15.12 (23 July 1914), 278). If true, this adds weight to the idea that the journal was truly ‘dialogic’: although Pound may have been targeted as ‘the enemy of the New Age’, it seems that he fought his corner, and with the editor’s blessing. See Robins, ‘Introduction’, Complete Writings on Art, p. xxxiv. 123 Walter Sickert, ‘A Perfect Modern’, NA, 14.23 (9 April 1914), 718; Robins, Complete Writings on Art, pp. 353–56; Wyndham Lewis, ‘Frederic Spencer Gore’, Blast, 1 (20 June 1914), 150; repr. in Wyndham Lewis on Art, pp. 54–55. 124 For standard accounts of the Vorticist movement, see Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde; Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art; Alan Munton and Michael Durman, ‘Wyndham Lewis and the nature of Vorticism’, in Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura/Pittura, ed. by Gianni Cianci (Palermo: Sellerio 1982), pp. 101–18; Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 95–137; BLAST: 1914–1918, ed. by Paul Edwards

180

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

(Aldershot: Ashgate 2000); and Jonathan Black, ed., Blasting the Future! Vorticism in Britain 1910–20 (London: Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art/Philip Wilson, 2004). 125 Rae, ‘From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game’, p. 690; Edwards, ‘ “You Must Speak with Two Tongues” ’, pp. 113–14, 116–18, 120. 126 Rae makes this case for treating Hulme’s thinking as part of the Vorticist aesthetic, p. 719 n. 68, contra Reed Way Dasenbrock, Literary Vorticism, pp. 55–56. 127 See Alan Munton, ‘Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis’, in T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, ed. by Andrzej Gasiorek and Edward P. Comentale (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 73–92 on Hulme’s contacts with Lewis. 128 ‘Modern Art III’, p. 661; CW, p. 296. 129 Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, pp. 3–5. 130 ‘Modern Art III’, p. 662; CW, p. 297. 131 David Bomberg, Foreword to the catalogue of Works by David Bomberg, Chenil Gallery exhibition, Exh. Cat. (London: Goupil Gallery, July 1914). Quoted in Cork, David Bomberg, p. 78. 132 Cork, David Bomberg, p. 50. 133 ‘Modern Art III’, p. 662; CW, pp. 297, 296. 134 ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, CW, pp. 283–84. 135 Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art, I, 199, 200, 211–13. 136 As Cork notes, a long précis of Volkelt’s theory was found among Hulme’s private notes, which seems to have been the basis of Hulme’s discussion in ‘Modern Art IV – Mr. David Bomberg’s Show,’ NA, 15.10 (9 July 1914), 230–32 (231); CW, pp. 302–09 (p. 306). See Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art, p. 212. 137 ‘Modern Art IV’, p. 231; CW, pp. 305–07. 138 Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art, pp. 191–92; 200, 213. 139 For example, see Lisa Tickner, ‘David Bomberg: In the Hold, Jews, and Cubism’, in Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 143–83. There is no space here to consider Bomberg’s Jewish background here, although it adds weight to my argument in Chapter 4 that Hulme had no interest in the kind of racial evaluations of art and literature made by Maurras, Lasserre or Ludovici. 140 For critical attention to modernist sympathies with syndicalism, see Kadlec, ‘Pound, BLAST and Syndicalism’, pp. 1015–31; Garver, ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’, pp. 133–47 and ‘Lost Politics’, pp. 103–30; see Chapter 3 for further references. 141 ‘Modern Art III’, p. 661; CW, pp. 294–95; ‘Modern Art IV’, p. 230; CW, pp. 302–04. 142 Garver’s term for Hulme’s apparent echoes of radical rhetoric in ‘Hulme among the Progressives’, p. 140. 143 Rae, ‘From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game’, pp. 690, 692. 144 Cork, David Bomberg, p. 66.

Varieties of Abstraction

181

145 Sickert taught at Westminster Art School from 1908 to 1910. See Cork, David Bomberg, pp. 14–15, 29, 50, 251, 285. 146 ‘Modern Art IV’, p. 232; CW, pp. 308–09. The picture is reproduced in Cork, David Bomberg, p. 30. 147 Wendy Baron, Walter Sickert: Paintings and Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 4. Peters Corbett, Walter Sickert (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), pp. 11–12, 13–14. 148 Cork, David Bomberg, p. 50. 149 David Bomberg, Foreword to the catalogue of Works by David Bomberg, Chenil Gallery exhibition, July 1914. Quoted in Cork, David Bomberg, p. 78. 150 Cork, David Bomberg, pp. 79–89. 151 Charles Ginner, ‘The Camden Town Group’, The Studio, 130.632 (November 1945), 129–36 (134). 152 Cork, David Bomberg, pp. 15, 29–31. 153 Ibid., p. 87. 154 These works are reproduced and discussed in Cork, David Bomberg, pp. 37–42. 155 See Hulme’s prescient note of 1906: ‘we can see the world as pure geometry, and we can make out its dividing lines […]. But the eye is in the mud. The eye is mud’, ‘Cinders’, CW, p. 19. See Cork, David Bomberg, pp. 2, 112–22, 126 for an account of the painter’s enforced return to representational painting in Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company (1919), to meet the requirements of the Canadian War Memorial Fund committee.

5

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

Hulme joined the army in August 1914 and was posted to the Western Front by the end of the year. He was shot and invalided back to London in April 1915.1 Letters home from the front, first published by Samuel Hynes as ‘Diary from the Trenches’, show how he found in warfare a dramatization of ideas he had earlier described in philosophical terms: a vision of chaos exposed beneath a superficial human order.2 Drawing on these experiences, Hulme’s solitary ‘war poem’, ‘Trenches: St Eloi’, dictated to Pound from his hospital bed, works at several levels.3 Its first-hand observations make tangible certain premises that Hulme had long played with abstractly. The image of the ‘cinder heap’ that haunted his notebooks and articles had become a fact. Over the flat slopes of St Eloi A wide wall of sand bags. Night, In the silence desultory men Pottering over small fires, cleaning their mess-tins: To and fro, from the lines, Men walk as on Piccadilly, Making paths in the dark, Through scattered dead horses, Over a dead Belgian’s belly. The Germans have rockets. The English have no rockets. Behind the line, cannon, hidden, lying back miles. Before the line, chaos: My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors. Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.

Hulme’s vision of the ‘mind as a corridor’ calls to mind the winding, narrow trenches that he had inhabited at St Eloi, but it also recalls a notion that had

184

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

gained prominence in fashionable philosophical discourse before the war. In an essay of 1906, and in the second of his lectures published as Pragmatism (1907), William James had quoted the young Italian philosopher Giovanni Papini, whose metaphor James felt encapsulated the pragmatic worldview: It is like a corridor in a hotel, from which a hundred doors open into a hundred chambers. In one you see a man on his knees praying to regain his faith; in another a desk at which sits some one eager to destroy all metaphysics; in a third a laboratory with an investigator looking for new footholds by which to advance upon the future. But the corridor belongs to all, and all must pass there. Pragmatism, in short, is a great corridor-theory.4

Papini, two years older than Hulme, was a key member of a pre-war Florentine avant-garde network centred on the periodicals Voce and Leonardo, both founded in 1903.5 Admirers of Jamesian pluralism, as discussed in Chapter 3, this group also shared an enthusiasm for works by Nietzsche, Bergson, Sorel and Croce. Papini met James in Italy in 1906, impressing the eminent philosopher, who later wrote glowingly of the Florentine school and of Papini in particular.6 Papini’s first book, Il Crepuscolo dei filosofi (1906), recounted the history of Western philosophy through a sceptical Nietzschean lens before arriving at a radicalized pragmatism.7 Two elements of his philosophy stand out: the ‘Corridor Theory’, discussed in a 1905 article for Leonardo, and the doctrine of ‘L’Uomo Dio’, developed in articles for Leonardo and in Il Crepuscolo dei filosofi between 1903 and 1906.8 Papini’s collaborator, Guiseppe Prezzolini, found similar themes in Sorel, on whom he wrote a short book La Teoria sindicalista (1909). James maintained links with the Florentine group until the end of his life, and his enthusiasm later helped Prezzolini secure a post at the Casa Italia in Columbia University. Hulme was aware of the Florentine writers: he cited Prezzolini in ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion’ in early 1911.9 He would have encountered Papini’s ‘Corridor Theory’ in James’s Pragmatism, and it is quite possible that he met members of the Florentine school at the Philosophical Congress at Bologna, which was dominated by papers along vitalist or pragmatist lines.10 Papini’s name was in the air, and the British pragmatist Schiller, whom Hulme would certainly have met along with D. L. Murray and Wildon Carr, as part of the British contingent, wrote a light-hearted report of the Congress for his Oxford college magazine, joking that the numerous rushed conversations he snatched between papers in the corridors owing to a busy conference schedule had proven Papini’s point.11

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

185

The Florentine pragmatists were of the same generation as the London modernists and moved in a remarkably similar direction philosophically and politically.12 Georges Sorel was an important figurehead: a friend and correspondent of the celebrated Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, his influence was as great in Italy as in France. He first published his Réflexions sur la violence in the Italian periodical Il Devinire sociale during 1905 and 1906, prior to its French publication in Le Mouvement socialiste.13 Prezzolini took particular interest in syndicalism, and Hulme recommended his book on Sorel to Ogden in a letter of November 1911.14 By 1912, Papini had allied himself with Futurism, won over despite, and perhaps by, a famous altercation between Marinetti and the Florentine intellectuals. This had culminated in Marinetti, Boccioni and Carrà, travelling to Florence and assaulting Ardengo Soffici, ally of the Voce group, who had written a critical review of a recent Futurist exhibition in Milan.15 The act of violence was significant, presaging a characteristic method of both Futurism and the early Italian Fasci di Combattimento movement. It is also reminiscent of Hulme’s threats against Ludovici in 1914, as discussed in Chapter 4. By 1914, through the pages of Voce, links were formed with its contributor Benito Mussolini and then with Fascism.16 Years later, when Mussolini cited James, Sorel and Voce as his sources for his fascism, the links were clear. That James should have such close ties to this network is ironic, given his own very different political stance.17 But what these writers had in common was the ‘Corridor Philosophy’ and the theory of myth. Although the echo of Papini’s idea is fleeting, perhaps coincidental, the metaphor is a highly appropriate one to capture Hulme’s positioning in the last three years of his life. Having spent several years developing a theory of philosophy and politics as essentially temperamental and non-rational, he had been to war, getting an extreme first-hand vision of such a relativist world. Under fire, no principle or worldview felt objectively sound: ‘the minds about me are corridors’. The effect of this experience was to usher Hulme towards a choice of ideological dugout: an induced, forced imposition of order of the sort he had earlier eulogized but had yet to justify, philosophically, for himself. He was now drawing conclusions over which ‘ideas-environment’ he would ultimately inhabit, and indeed, it was the one glimpsed briefly in the passage cited by James, a room in which a man was knelt at prayer. However, an awareness of the corridor outside – an underlying sense of relativism – remained present even as Hulme adopted this position. The ‘Corridor Theory’ strangely anticipates Freeden’s metaphor of ideology as a chamber, or ‘ideas-environment’, discussed in Chapter 2.18 Extending the

186

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

metaphor, in light of Papini’s image for pragmatism, it seems that Hulme could both visualize his ideology – his chosen ‘room’ – and step outside it, seeing his dogma as one of many: his attitude as both arbitrary and, in his mind, absolute. The two layers of Hulmean certainty are figured usefully again here: an absolutism, constructed upon a relativism. The stoic ending of Hulme’s poem leads us towards what he was beginning to identify as a ‘religious attitude’.19 ‘Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.’ This vision of utter relativism must be kept in view when considering how Hulme, on his return to England, was increasingly driven to establish objective values. ‘The eye is in the mud’, as Hulme had stated in ‘Cinders’, and in the seven instalments of ‘A Notebook’, a record of his philosophical position at this time, we see the urgency with which he sought to rise out of the ‘muddy mixed zone’ of the contingent.20 The struggle to find order in chaos had all too clear resonances. Wounded soldiers arrived from the front, after a relatively quick journey, at Charing Cross Station. The contrast and proximity between two worlds must have been striking, bringing home Hulme’s juxtaposition of Piccadilly and St Eloi. It was only in the realm of artificial cleanliness and order, in the hospital bed where he read Husserl’s and Moore’s proposals for an objective order, that Hulme could shore up his religious attitude in any sensible form.21 As Pound took down Hulme’s Pascalian vision, he was still deeply engaged in Vorticism, in the middle of writing his ‘Affirmations’ series, which seems to retain a kind of Neoplatonic mysticism, in contrast with Hulme’s movement towards more disciplined Christian dogma.22 One wonders if Pound grasped the journey that Hulme had undertaken. James Longenbach suggests that Pound’s role was to ‘translate’ Hulme’s ‘conversation’, mere prosaic observation, into poetry, blending Hulme’s ‘real war emotion’ with a ‘lyric impulse’.23 However, these lines are in fact reminiscent of Hulme’s earlier verse. The degree of each man’s contribution to the poem’s metre and form is impossible to ascertain, but the images are Hulme’s. For example, the image of men ‘making paths in the dark’, over dead horses and human bodies, was first recorded in his ‘Diary from the Trenches’; while the reference to rockets is elaborated in Hulme’s later series ‘War Notes’, where he observes the Germans’ advantages in terms of armaments and technology.24 Both observations have a deeper significance for Hulme, the first illustrating how what seem to be well-established structures, whether Piccadilly, or the culture and politics of Western liberal democracy, are created by expediency and remain as provisional as an embattled front line.25 The second connects to Hulme’s earlier, now increasingly firm, belief that ‘reality’ may be defined through superior firepower or weaponry, by a ‘gun mechanism’

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

187

rather than any moral imperative.26 These metaphors form the core of the poem, which evokes tangible sense impression to bring such abstract principles down to earth, a device that exemplifies the Imagist aesthetic. The corridor image has no precedent in Hulme’s work, but it does have an echo in Papini’s metaphor, one that seems to encapsulate much of Hulme’s thinking.

Georges Sorel Hulme’s ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence appeared in the New Age on 14 October 1915, before its inclusion in a revised form in the first edition of Hulme’s translation (Reflections on Violence) in 1916. Its initial publication broke Hulme’s silence of several months. It reflected important changes in his ideas between 1914 and 1915. However, to understand its significance to Hulme, we need to look back to 1910, when he first encountered Sorel’s defence of syndicalism. As noted in Chapter 4, Hulme discovered Sorel when compiling his extremely thorough bibliography of writings about Bergson, later published with Pogson’s translation of Time and Free Will (1910).27 Bored with most of the repetitive commentary, he was struck by Sorel’s account, published in Le Mouvemente socialiste in 1910.28 Sorel’s interest in Bergson was keen: he attended the philosopher’s 1900 lectures at the Collège de France with his friend Charles Péguy on visits to Paris; later, they would discuss these ideas in Péguy’s bookshop on the Rue Sorbonne with various followers.29 Sorel is typical, like Bergson, of the ‘revolt against positivism’; he has a central position in H. Stuart Hughes’ account of that phenomenon.30 It is also often noted that his first book Le Procès de Socrate (1889), is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, yet there is no direct influence.31 Sorel’s rejection of reason and appeal for a return to a reliance on faith and instinct captured the anti-intellectualist mood of the time. Like Nietzsche, he admired the primal energy of Aeschylus over the ratiocinations of Euripides.32 This was the key note of his two most famous works, both published in 1908: Réflexions sur la violence, formed from series of articles published first in Il Divenire sociale and later in Le Mouvement socialiste; and Les Illusions du progrès, first published in Le Mouvement socialiste. Sometime after reading Sorel’s Bergson essay, Hulme read these texts, the influence of which is apparent in his political writings of 1911–1912. He also wrote to Sorel personally asking for the translation rights for Réflexions sur la violence, which he was granted. The project was put on hold, however, when Hulme could not

188

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

find a publisher.33 Meanwhile, fleeting references to syndicalism in Hulme’s work and a growing scepticism regarding the modern notion of progress in his 1911 essays point to the influence of Sorel’s writing.34 The nature of Hulme’s interest in Sorel becomes clearer in a letter to C. K. Ogden of November 1911, in which he discusses the relationship between Sorel’s political and ‘ethical’ criticism: The statement you saw in the New Age about Sorel having left the Syndicalists and become a Neo Royalist was in a review by Orage. I happened to have told him something of the kind in conversation. It isn’t quite accurate, but it is fairly so. He has certainly changed his opinions considerably lately. It was Jules de Gaultier as a matter of fact who told me that Sorel had become a Neo Royalist. The reason he said it was, I imagine, was that Sorel has quite changed round from the anti-patriotism of ‘Reflexions sur la violence’ to exactly the opposite side in an article on Joan of Arc […]. Personally I find Sorel a great deal more interesting than Syndicalism itself. I think that after Bergson, he is the most interesting person writing at the present time. I think it is a mistake entirely to get at him merely as a writer on Socialism. He is much more a person of Nietzsches [sic] stamp, whose main interest is in general ethical criticism. I came across him through Bergson. [My italics]35

As Hulme emphasizes, it was not primarily Sorel’s politics that interested him, but his ‘ethical criticism’. What is striking is that we can find this component of Sorel’s ideology on the right as well as the left. But the shared element is a moral principle, not a political one. Hulme makes this point again in the ‘Preface’ to his translation which finally appeared as Reflections on Violence in 1916. First published in the New Age in 1915 before being revised for book publication, Hulme’s ‘Preface’ stressed Sorel’s ethic. First, he describes the confusion of progressive readers when faced by a socialist who disbelieved in democracy. To explain this, Hulme distinguishes between the working class as a movement and the ideology commonly associated with that movement, which he names ‘democracy’. (As Hulme makes clear, this analysis employs a very particular, common definition of ‘democracy’ as the larger progressive worldview manifested in ever-widening electoral representation and popular influence – but this is not the only possible definition of the term.) The inability of people to distinguish between the working class and the ‘democratic’ ideology is due to the tendency to see certain ideas as permanently conjoined, whereas, in fact, they are merely linked through recent habit. This habit is the product of a very successful form of political rhetoric, which Hulme describes as implanting a pair of ‘blue spectacles’ in the mind.36 The figure of speech harks back to his

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

189

account of political conversion in 1911, in which he first used the image of blue lenses to explain how ideas are associated metaphorically at first but gain the appearance of permanent association.37 According to Hulme, the ideology that Sorel discards is a romantic democratic one with a genealogical root in the works of Rousseau. In its place, he recommends a classicist and pessimistic outlook. In a footnote, Hulme points out that this change of worldview is anticipated by modern art, citing ‘promising signs’ of a break up of the Renaissance aesthetic.38 Classicism and pessimism are common to many schools, he goes on, and this explains Sorel’s surprising affinities with Action française. However, in contrast with Action française, Sorel finds the return of classicism in the struggle of the classes. Hulme declines to comment on this point, indicating his reservations regarding Syndicalism. He concludes by identifying Sorel as one of the most remarkable socialists since Marx. The absolute ethic that underpins his polemic is being re-established. A similar combination can be found in Proudhon, but the ideology attacked in the latter’s work had reached a fuller stage of development and can be better perceived in Sorel’s account. Those disillusioned with liberal and pacifist democracy, while shrinking from reactionary alternatives, might find in Sorel an economic revolutionary inspired by attractively austere ethical principles.39 Although Hulme distances himself from Sorel’s specific political message, the overlap between left and right that he represents is central to the present study, as the key to a certain network operating in the New Age under Orage. This chapter will first consider the common element, a shared ethic or worldview; how it developed in Sorel’s work from a background in socialism; and how Hulme made it the basis of a revision of his philosophical outlook in 1915–1916. To make this revision, he turned to Husserl, Moore and elements of Russell’s thought; but I would argue that the resulting ‘neo-realism’ was fabricated ex post facto, subsequent to Hulme’s Pascalian commitment to a non-rational religious attitude. Having established this, one can then consider how this position related to British socialism via the work of Hulme’s colleagues at the New Age, Maeztu and Orage. Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence is predicated on the argument that true progress in society comes not from the moderation of industry to improve workers’ basic quality of existence, but in the intensification of industry, at the workers’ cost, until the resulting conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat reaches a point of crisis. Sorel recommends the cultivation of conflict, represented physically in the form of violent strikes, which he sees as a sign of social health. So long as the bourgeoisie refuses to compromise, but ploughs on with the pursuit of maximum profits, and so long as the proletariat

190

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

accumulates and expresses a legitimate fury at its exploitation, then the product will, paradoxically, be a galvanized industry, fuelled by animosity and the worker’s dream of seizing control of the means of production: ‘everything may be saved if the proletariat, by their use of violence, manage to re-establish the division into classes and so restore to the bourgeoisie something of its energy’.40 For Sorel, however, there was another level to this argument, a resonance between Marx’s attack on liberalism and a ubiquitous fin-de-siècle rhetoric regarding ‘decadence’.41 The idea that ameliorative compromise would skew the natural evolution of industry generated a version of the ‘degeneration’ debate. In this view, conflict on firm, moral grounds invigorates both sides, while compromise weakens them. The reasoning process behind liberalism reflected a notion of humanitarian progress, which had come to the fore in the eighteenth century, but which reflected the much older fallacy that human reason was capable of constructing an ideal society. Sorel approved of Marx’s account of impersonal forces driving history towards revolution and his condemnation of ineffectual utopianism, but objected to his subdued but deeprooted optimism regarding an ideal society to come. He identified this ‘utopist’ streak in Marx with an engrained Enlightenment belief in human potential. For Sorel, this optimism was an error traceable back to Socrates, whom, in Le Procès de Socrate, he saw as a true ‘corruptor of youth’, who deserved his death sentence. Here, Sorel is again very close to Nietzsche, who is cited directly in Réflexions sur la violence.42 Sorel was then committed to the paradoxical moral principle that humans should somehow subordinate themselves to impersonal forces while working towards an apparent goal. The principle of human weakness and need for discipline thus existed here on the left, in the tradition of Proudhon, and was inherited by Sorel. What Sorel overall provided was a sense of historical shift that fitted well with the ideas of a classicist revival in the work of Maurras and the theory of abstract art set out by Worringer. The idea of a fundamental change in the sensibility of the West was still at the forefront of Hulme’s mind, and it was framed as a shift from ‘humanism’ to ‘anti-humanism’. These terms enter Hulme’s vocabulary in the ‘Notebook’ series, replacing, but not blotting out, the previous terms ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’ and the correlating terms of ‘empathy’ and ‘abstraction’. These attitudes were first apparent through their artistic expression; only later came the philosophical rationale, and this, in Hulme’s view, was secondary – the tool or weapon wielded by a generation already decided on its goals.

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

191

Ideology and diremption In dealing with ideology, Sorel raises the question of how a set of ideas can be formulated if all belief is essentially intuitive. This notion of ideology marks another break with Marx, for whom ideology was an unconscious set of attitudes that were a by-product of a fundamentally economic process. For Sorel, in contrast, ideology consisted of a set of ideas that could be separated and studied in isolation, before being approved or discarded as part of a cluster of ideas. Sorel identified a key part of this process as ‘diremption’. In Sorel’s own words, ‘I put before my readers the working of a mental effort which is continually endeavoring to break through the bonds of what has been previously constructed for common use.’43 The notion that ideas are clustered together purely through custom, and are not necessarily soldered together, is a profound one for Hulme. It is closely related to the realization of the intuitive nature of ideas, of their basis in instinct. He makes this point in the ‘Preface’ to Sorel: In a movement like Socialism we can conveniently separate out two distinct elements, the working-class movement itself and the system of ideas which goes with it (though the word is ugly, it will be convenient to follow Sorel and call a system of ideas an ideology). If we call one (I) and the other (W) (I + W) will be the whole movement. The ideology is, as a matter of fact, democracy. Now 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.44

From his earliest work, Sorel’s pessimistic stance, at odds with the spirit of liberal democracy, was clear. Two years after Réflexions sur la violence, they became even clearer when Sorel began writing for the Maurrasian Action française newspaper. His syndicalist allies were astonished, as were the socialist readers of the New Age. Hulme anticipated, and no doubt enjoyed, their confusion: This combination of doctrines, which they would probably call reactionary with revolutionary syndicalism, is certainly very disconcerting to Liberal Socialists. It is difficult for them to understand a revolutionary who is anti-democratic, an absolutist in ethics, rejecting all rationalism and relativism, who values the mystical element in religion ‘which will never disappear’, speaks contemptuously of modernism and ‘progress’, and uses a concept like honour with no sense of its unreality.45

The cause for their exasperation was the engrained habit of seeing Socialism as a fixed concept, which included, integrally, the principle of democracy.46

192

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

For Hulme, this inability to analyse and rearrange the component parts of any concept reflects the way concepts are deep-rooted, founded on basic principles that are non-rational, in fact metaphoric. Hulme here is rehearsing his argument on political conversion from 1911: The explanation of how these major premises get into the position of pseudo categories goes a long way towards removing a man from their influence. They are unperceived because they have become so much part of the mind and lie so far back that we are never really conscious of them as ideas at all. We don’t see them, but see other things through them, and consequently take what we see for the outlines of things themselves. Blue spectacles making a blue world can be pointed out, but not these pseudo-categories which lie, as it were, ‘behind the eye’ […]. 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 consciously judge … . Fortunately these systems of ideas have a gradual growth; and a type of history, very difficult to write, makes it possible to dig out these pseudo-categories, and expose them as objects on a table. This is a violent operation, and the mind is never quite the same after. It has lost a certain virginity. But there are so many of these systems in which we unwittingly ‘live and move and have our being’ that the process really forms the major part of the education of the adult. It is this method which Sorel has so successfully applied in ‘Les Illusions du progrès’ to the particular democratic ideology with which we are here concerned.47

The analysis of ideology is, as he puts it, ‘a violent operation, after which the mind has lost a certain virginity’.48 Ideas that were taken as read, that were assumptions, are shown to be fabricated on entirely irrational grounds. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘diremption’ as a ‘forcible separation or severance’.49 Sorel was the first to apply the term to political theory. As noted, we can see how Hulme had discussed a very similar strategy as early as 1911, in his articles on ‘the art of political conversion’. It was here that he first imagined the bases of politics in deep-rooted metaphors, which had to be isolated and exposed, or cut out like ‘a tumour’.50 This method revealed how the larger clusters of ideas that comprised any given ideology were arbitrarily constructed on non-rational images. This rootedness in intuitive experience was the measure of any given ideology’s persuasive power. Hulme’s theory of political conversion echoes Taine’s account of the idée fixe and Le Bon’s crowd psychology, but it is closest in spirit to Sorel’s Les Illusions du progrès and Réflexions sur la violence. Diremption has something in common with Hulme’s ‘violent’ excision of the foreign body in the mind, the idea planted there through a trick of

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

193

language, through the power of metaphor. This is Hulme’s primary focus in his ‘Preface’, as he takes us through the way ideologies are seen as packages of ideas, and how we can take them apart. Diremption is remarkably similar to the notion of ‘conceptual disaggregation’, the contemporary theory of ideology as a ‘cluster’ of ‘essentially contested concepts’ proposed by Michael Freeden and discussed in the introduction and intermittently throughout this study.51 Sorel is ahead of his time in breaking from Marx, rejecting the notion of ideology as something pervasive, unconscious – a by-product of economic forces which presents itself as reasoned argument and normative behaviour. For Sorel, ideology is available for dissection into its component parts, and for conscious reconstruction according to one’s preferences. Bits and pieces can be taken apart and put together in new permutations. Hulme’s ‘Preface’ in fact concentrates on this, privileging the principle of ‘diremption’ among the various dimensions of Sorel’s thought (indeed, Hulme adds a footnote regretting his comparative neglect of other areas, including Sorel’s relations to Vico, Marx and Proudhon). The fact that Hulme immediately raises the method of analysis, and the treatment of ideology as a bunch of concepts that can be separated, is telling. Hulme’s experiment, like Sorel’s, is to realign working-class movement with anti-democratic thought. He frames this in algebraic terms.52 Hulme returns to the method of diremption in the eighth of his ‘War Notes’, which similarly analyses the habit of associating moral conservatism with the right and shows how it can also occur on the left. It is here that he distances himself from Action française and associates himself with Proudhon. This is possible because he has identified the element that attracted him to Maurras and can separate it, excise it and discard the other elements he dislikes – which are, specifically, the organic statism that he finds Maurras has in common with German authoritarianism. (D) is liberal, hedonist, pacifist democracy; (A) is the absolute conception of ethics; (O) is the ‘organic’ view of the State. I dislike (D). I approve, therefore, of the attack on relativist, utilitarian ethics to be found in Proudhon, and also, be it added, in many reactionary writers. I tend also to believe in the ‘organic’ theory of the State, since that also is diametrically opposed to (D). And there the matter rests, and I confuse O and A together, tending to think they are somehow one or necessarily connected. And thus from a perfectly legitimate rejection of utilitarian democracy. I might incline towards an anti-democratic position. I certainly have been interested in the theories of this kind to be found in Taine, Barres, and in Maurras. It so happens, however, that the (O) is the characteristic

194

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

German theory of the State. When circumstances force me to consider very attentively the consequences of this ‘organic’ theory, I may then realise that its connection with (A), the absolute view of ethics, is no necessary one; and consequently be driven to realise that the right theory of society is to be found in Proudhon, and not in the reactionaries.53

The occurrence of common elements in apparently antagonistic political categories becomes more understandable in light of Sorel’s ‘diremption’ and, one might contend, Freeden’s ‘ideological morphology’. As noted above, Hulme distanced himself from Sorel’s practical politics, his support for the syndicalism of the C.G.T. in particular. Yet it is remarkable how many echoes there are between early modernism and the upsurge in British syndicalism before the Great War. Kadlec has shown how Blast echoed a number of journal titles associated with anarcho-syndicalism before the war, and how Pound, in particular, echoed radical left rhetoric, even identifying himself as ‘a syndicalist, somewhat atrabilious’, in 1914.54 However, Kadlec leaves aside several conspicuous signs of this connection. Hulme’s translation of Sorel, his long-standing association with the New Age and friendship with Orage and his collaborative writing with Ramiro de Maeztu surely deserve consideration here. Moreover, we must recall that Bomberg’s painting In the Hold, which best captured Hulme’s philosophical preoccupations, also depicted the London dockers who led the Transport Workers’ Strike of 1912, as discussed in the previous chapter. I do not want to draw too definite a set of links between these facts, but I do want to follow Kadlec’s example in noting their suggestiveness. Where he finds echoes of syndicalism in Pound’s poetics, we can surely do the same for Hulme – not merely in his poetics, but in his art criticism, and in the philosophical ideas that underpinned both. In all cases, Hulme explores the tension between the chaos of experience and the order imposed by human interpretation, an idea he found in Ribot, Bergson, Taine and Le Bon, and which, in 1914, he had found in Worringer and projected upon Bomberg. To capture this tensional position, between messy particularities and misleadingly tidy concepts, is the aim of both Hulme’s Imagism and his theory of art. Like Taine, Hulme saw how this psychological theory had a political bearing, and how it correlated with tensions between the masses and the governing elite. Also like Taine, he saw the dangers of victory on either side, one way leading to the anarchic instincts of a barbaric general will, but the other led to the sterile tyranny of a delusional idée fixe. Rather, he saw the possibility of equilibrium through conflict, harmony through tension. Hulme’s pessimism rejected the notion of a final solution: conflict was all. A balancing act between intuition

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

195

and abstraction, between a dangerous vivacity and a deadening security, was as good a solution as was possible, whether in verse, art or politics. This principle of fighting for fighting’s sake was not only Sorelian, but it also had much in common with the socialism that Orage had developed independently, as traced in Chapter 3. It correlates with the attempts to find forms of political pluralism that preserved the quality of individual experience by containing it within a corporate state. Garver rightly sees the ‘rhetorical affinities’ shared by Hulme and the New Age’s militant socialism, but I aim to get at their root.55 Why do the same figures of speech occur? Because they are not merely figures of speech but the signifiers of a deeper idea, a shared, pre-political, philosophical discussion – in short, as Hulme puts it, a shared ‘ethic’. This insight allows us to avoid the contrivance of Garver’s attempt to align Hulme at a straightforwardly political level with New Age socialism. Sorelian syndicalism and Hulmean Toryism are clearly different political categories. Yet within both occurs a notion of equilibrium gained through struggle, harmony through irresolvable conflict – a state of mind that Bomberg captured visually, and which Maeztu would encapsulate in his 1915 essays on the same theme. Hulme’s and Maeztu’s 1915–1916 writing blurs the significance of the Strike and the War. Both conflicts were analysable on this logic. The path to this affinity has been laid out in previous chapters. Hulme’s first association of concept formation and political phenomena was traced in Chapter 4. Taine laid the foundations for crowd psychology by making this connection, associating lower sense impressions with the masses, and the abstract concept, the idée fixe, with the governing elite. The tension between raw force and higher order is at the heart of all Hulme’s writing, and the parallels are already apparent in 1909, when his writing echoes Orage in its use of the crowd metaphor to describe Bergson’s intuitionism. These parallels echoed Taine, more recently, Le Bon, and most recent of all, Sorel. Orage was aware of these and similar connections, thanks to Carpenter, among others. While the connection in 1909 was metaphoric, a ‘rhetorical affinity’, from 1911 Hulme addressed political matters directly, and the influence of Taine and Le Bon, alongside Bergson and Ribot, became apparent. In Sorel, he found the same logic developed into a theory of syndicalism, driven by myth. In all these thinkers, a tension lies between two forces: the primitive and the sophisticated, the intuitive and the conceptual, the chaos of the masses and the order of the elite: the energy of the syndicates and the authority of the King.

196

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

With his entry into art criticism, Hulme’s position, as analysed in the previous chapter, sought to capture the specifics of experience at the point of their conversion into abstraction. As noted in Chapter 3, Hulme’s thinking resonated with the Guild Socialist project of intensifying individuals’ consciousness through their inclusion in the social collective. Now Sorel added his contribution, identifying the tension between the militant proletariat and the equally vigorous industrial bourgeoisie; between the industrial infrastructure, the parliamentary system and the labourers’ lives beneath; between the net of words and the things beneath; and between the net of visual convention and the organic forms they seek to pin down. This is where Sorel is most closely connected to the Hulmean modernist project, which, as discussed in previous chapters, strove to achieve a tensional balance between particularities and concepts, through clashing words or images. The pattern is pronounced in writing by Sorel, in his evident debt to Bergson, in his emphasis on myth, and in the social pattern that he recommends, which avoids the abstraction of individuals in a liberal parliamentary democracy. Sorel sought a reinvestment of value in the spiritual life of individuals achieved through a class war; through a militant working-class spirit which, both selfsacrificing and thereby self-invigorating, would replace a lacklustre, abstract liberal morality.56 These ideas connect through Sorel’s notion of myth: the product of a series of juxtaposed, emotive images, without rational links. Such moments of intuition galvanize society without promising impossible futures. Myth stands in contrast to the utopia: a rational discursive plan with a definite anticipated moment of realization. The clash of images that Sorel identifies in ‘myth’ is one version of the ‘discord’ with which this book is concerned, a legacy of Taine’s and Le Bon’s accounts of the crowd mind and Bergson’s notion of intuitive knowledge. Closely related to this is the form of galvanizing discord that Sorel recommends in social organization itself. As opposed to the abstracted human units counted upon by liberal democracy, the individual generated by Sorel’s envisaged, conflictual society would be granted flesh and blood reality. This would be achieved by denying the smooth rationalization, the categorization and classification of humans that permits the operation of liberal democracy.57 The principle of conflicting images in Hulme’s poetic theory arises from the same sources as his politics, and indeed he was not the only one to detect these links between theories of aesthetic insight and political consciousness. For example, Sorel’s imagined crowds driven by ‘warmly-coloured images’ anticipate above all the ‘intellectual montage’ method used by Sergei Eisenstein,

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

197

in films such as Battleship Potemkin.58 In an essay of 1929, Eisenstein compared the technique to the Japanese haiku form and the hieroglyphs of written Chinese.59 Similarities with Pound’s Imagist aesthetic, and particularly with his use of the haiku form, are striking. For our purposes, what is more interesting, and less noted in criticism, is Eisenstein’s debt to the crowd psychology developed through Taine, Le Bon and Sorel; a line of thought that is at the heart of Hulme’s poetic theory and his wider modernist project. To understand the links between Hulme’s early poetic theory and the Réflexions sur la violence, one might consider a film like Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), which vividly superimposes image upon image, as footage of a slaughtered cow is juxtaposed with images of crowds charging in revolution. The most relevant parts of Sorel lie in his connection of a rhetoric of moral decadence and degeneration to Marxian historiography, in his longer view of history as a process of eternal, alternating states of pessimism and optimism, and in his rejection of utopian hopes for perfection or facile self-betterment through the developing sophistication of human reason. Hulme’s interest in Sorel lay in the notion of politics as superficial ratiocination, secretly founded on more profound forces. He was drawn to the notion of myth as an alternative to the trite notion of progress, and to the view of ideology as a cluster of ideas that could be taken apart and re-arranged consciously. It is difficult to draw a compelling or logical connection between Sorel’s thinking and Mussolini’s fascism in practice. Sorelian ideology, and the spirit of syndicalism, was pluralist and resistant to dictatorship. It was, however, anti-democratic, in so far as the term ‘democracy’ was used in its broadest, least discriminating sense, as government by general will. Hulme, for one, was not party to the idea of a knowing elite manipulating the masses. While he took some pleasure in analysing ‘the art of political conversion’, he did not claim a superior or detached vantage point on this phenomenon. In his view, the human condition is universally flawed and limited. Hulme does not accept the ‘silly’ notion of two forms of morality: one for the masses and the other for the rulers – a notion he rejected in Nietzsche and derided in Ludovici.60 Rather, he sees the Christian ethic, the principle of Original Sin, as applicable to the whole of humanity. No individual, then, can claim the position of a God. If Hulme is interested in the role of myth, in his view, it must be selfadministered, and he admires most the spirit that will consciously yield to what it cannot rationally accept. He recommends the wilful submission of the individual to a higher power – not to a human power. For Hulme, the ultimate

198

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

myth then is that of religious faith. This is the only authentic myth because it has no human creator who wields it as his toy, to achieve the submission of his fellow creatures.

The movement towards realism This leads us on to a major question: of whether Hulme’s late adoption of ‘objective values’ was genuine or not. In the series entitled ‘A Notebook’ (1915– 1916), Hulme expanded what Csengeri has called his ‘mature philosophy’.61 Rae argues that he remained a pragmatist.62 More recently, Andrzej Gasiorek has made the case that Hulme’s position goes definitely beyond pragmatism into true realism.63 I would argue that the two positions become blurred here, perhaps via Hulme’s growing interest in Pascal, who recommended that imitation may lead to genuine religiosity: to enact the ritual, even in disbelief, was to ‘deaden one’s acuteness’.64 The famous, sometimes vexed distinction drawn by Frank Kermode between fiction and myth, between mask and reality, seems most pertinent here. Yet, unlike the myths that Kermode discusses, humanly constructed myths, the myth adopted by Hulme is the most fundamental available: it is no delusion of human grandeur, of an imminent and immanent eschaton in human affairs, but the acceptance of a higher power unknown to man. The step from fiction to myth is on a far grander scale.65 Does Hulme entirely depart from his nominalism up to this point? In his view, what matters is the gut instinct, the Weltanschauung: all else follows from this, and argumentation falls short, however sophisticated, if it is not motivated by a fundamental belief. But what remains conspicuous across the oeuvre, and what Hulme had no time to formally disown, was that his habit of thought was overwhelmingly nominalist and pragmatist, even in the last years when he identifies his instinct, his very temperament, as one of frustrated yearning for ‘realism’. Gasiorek is right to register the ostentatious certainty of Hulme’s ‘brutal assertion’, his ‘absolutely cold’ statement of belief in objective and transcendent values in these passages.66 However, this study aligns itself, over all, with Rae’s reading. Hulme’s signature method of reducing the sacred abstractions of modern thought to their component parts is too close in one’s memory, too closely linked to his very personality up to 1912. Moreover, his proximity to the fabulator Sorel in 1915 does nothing to quell a sense of self-conscious posturing; Sorel, like Hulme, quotes Pascal on the leap of faith and the numbing of the rational mind. Hulme’s determination and coldness are, I would argue, signs

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

199

of his need to make that jump from a conscious acceptance of fictions to the grandest of myths – that of an unknowable deity. He protests too much that his assertion is brutal, cold and objective. The picture we get is of an act of will, not reason. But, once the will to believe has asserted itself, a supportive structure of reasoning has to be provided. What Hulme does, in the series entitled ‘A Notebook’, is to divide his thinking into two parts. First, he decides that he wants to be a realist at a gut, instinctive level, and then he goes back and constructs the rationale. The latter, as we shall see, derives largely from Husserl and Moore, with elements from Russell. As Rae shows, the pragmatic foundations of Hulme’s ‘religious attitude’ are most clear in the first of his series entitled ‘A Notebook’, which was omitted from the version published in Speculations as ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’.67 An example, perhaps the crucial moment, of Hulme’s ‘brutal assertion’ of faith in absolute values, is recorded here vividly. He recalls sitting in a library, recognizable as the British Museum reading room: I remember one occasion, when failing to find an article I was looking for, and depressed by the museum dome, I let myself drift aimlessly through the controversies of three years. When the last ounce of solidity seemed thus to melt away in the universal deliquescence, the thing became 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. These were solid rock, whatever might be the extent of the flux elsewhere.68

We are reminded of Hulme’s experience of the ‘Nightmare of Determinism’, but whereas he had before recoiled at a vision of relentless, mechanistic order, he was now aghast at the prospect of endless relativism. We sense Hulme’s ‘horror’ as things ‘seemed to melt’ into ‘universal deliquescence’, as he confronted a disorder strangely akin to that of Flanders. Hulme ‘drift[s] aimlessly through the controversies of three years’; his ‘mind is a corridor’. The drift is brought up short by a ‘brutal act of assertion’, the adoption of a position. This bypasses Hulme’s inveterate scepticism, his habitual demolition of abstract truths. Rather than reducing concepts to their component parts, seeing a muddy trench in Piccadilly, or scaffolding in place of a house, he wants ‘solid rock’: objective facts. This reversal of his general habit of knocking down idols was apparently driven by a much profounder instinct for certainty, for a gut feeling about certain statements: The first of these assertions was: ‘There is an absolute difference between men and animals. It is impossible to completely explain the nature of man, as a complex

200

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

development out of the animal world.’ This is perhaps best understood when it is taken as the crucial instance of a number of parallel assertions of a similar type, assertions which depend on the answer to this question: ‘Can all the phenomena we are accustomed to call “higher” be explained as complexes of “lower” elements?’ For the empirical philosophy this is so, and in every subject it tends to pursue the same kind of explanation. All ‘height’ for it, then, is of the type of the pyramid, a more or less elaborate construction of ‘lower’ elements. For another philosophy, however, the ‘higher’ phenomena contain an irreducible element.69

Hulme’s resolution here marks the wilful blurring of the two levels previously seen in his work, his habitual nominalism which reduced higher phenomena to lower complexes, together with his thwarted wish that the higher phenomena were true. The latter had come out before in a paradoxical liking for fixity in the midst of flux; the pursuit of the liminal stage between the stream of consciousness and its abstract representation had made his Bergsonism distinctive and shaped his theory of art. He now insisted that a higher form of abstraction, not predicated on reason, but on faith, could neutralize his rage to break things apart. Faith would supersede the reliance on ‘fictions’; the deft poker hand of pragmatism was no longer required. But what Hulme could not conceal was that his whole intellectual development has been driven by a lively instinct to take apart those concepts accepted on face value by generations of Western thinkers. It appeared then that his insistence that belief should be genuine, not just a pragmatic measure, was an act of will. That this runs against the grain of his philosophic tastes since his earliest youth can be seen in the contrivance into which he is forced as regards the technical apparatus for his new-found realism. He has to backtrack now, to return to the scientific side of philosophy, to seal his conversion from nominalist to realist. Hulme’s position here is remarkably similar to that of Orage, who, as we have seen in Chapter 3, relied similarly on a wilful belief, the creation of a myth.70 Orage had highlighted the same problem of making distinctions between the animal, the human and the divine, for example in the title of his 1907 book, Consciousness: Animal, Human, and Superhuman. Hulme and Orage are facing down the question posed by Darwin: is the notion of species, and are the names we give forms of life, indicative of true order in things?71 Is there, in short, such a thing as the Great Chain of Being – or is life in a state of continuous flux, so that all hierarchies, all sense of order in nature, are just human constructions? If so, we see either a world of mere matter, a nightmare of determinism; or, conversely, a world in which religion is spilt, and divinity

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

201

oozes throughout the immanent world, like ‘a pot of treacle’ poured ‘over the dinner table’.72 Orage did not insist on the impossibility, but the difficulty, of traversing the limits of humanity in either direction, of moving back to animal consciousness, or moving upwards to something higher than human consciousness. Hulme and Orage want to place limits on humanity: for Hulme they are absolute; for Orage they are intensely difficult to comprehend. This is where they differ and explains why Orage remained, if only just, on the other side of a certain philosophical divide.73 Later, this division would be conspicuous in Orage’s perceptive remark that while he and Hulme had in common a belief in Original Sin, Hulme did not believe in redemption, while Orage clearly did. The doctrines of the Fall of Man and Original Sin may, indeed, have been obscured in the rise of Humanism; and their re-affirmation may therefore be very necessary. But is not the complementary doctrine of the Redemption – upon which, as I understand it, Humanism itself is based – equally in need of affirmation?74

It was a difficult and vexed journey, but Orage believed in the value of striving towards that goal – he retained that Carpenter-esque dream of pushing the upper limits of the human condition.

Discontinuity The second of Hulme’s ‘Notebook’ series contains a crucial step in his thinking. It introduces the argument that there are fundamental discontinuities between regions of experience. These fall into three realms, which Hulme imagines as concentric circles: the non-organic, the vital and the theological.75 This text has been rightly identified as the key to placing Hulme’s thought into a coherent pattern.76 One suspects he felt the need for such a key himself to explain the shifts in his thought since 1906. The solution resolves all the tensions, between the passion for positivism of his earlier youth; the habitual nominalism that marks his earliest notebooks and journalism up to 1911; the desire for a reinstated order, conspicuous behind that nominalism, that increasingly asserted itself in his political and art theory; and, from 1915, a frank, Pascalian leap of faith. Where critics still claim to find crude contradictions in this journey, Hulme provides the most lucid map in his adoption of a theory of three orders. There is no inconsistency in Hulme, merely a thoroughness in traversing the ground

202

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

step by step. Each component fits here: his adolescent pleasure in the certainties of mathematics and physics is served by the outer circle – here lie positivists like Spencer, Galton and MacAlister, who had done so much to shape Hulme’s early intellectual horizons. The revolt against such certainties is served by the middle region – as Hulme states, here we find Nietzsche and Bergson. Finally, the realm of theological certainty is apparent; and here, judging from the frequency with which his name now appeared in Hulme’s writing, we might find Pascal.77 Indeed, Hulme may have drawn on a similar discussion in Pascal’s Pensées, distinguishing three orders of knowledge: the carnal, the intellectual and wisdom (or ‘charity’). Understanding of each of these spheres is limited, to inhabit one precludes knowledge of the others.78 The Pensées had a special importance for writers such as Sorel and for younger associates such as Péguy and Maritain, followers of Bergson who had over time returned to Catholicism, partly in deference to the Vatican’s suppression of theological modernism: Pascal seemed to offer a similar approach to faith to the one provided for a time by Bergson, but in theologically acceptable terms.79 Hulme admired the philosopher as one of the avant-garde, who expressed a worldview well in advance of his contemporaries, a position Hulme aspired to himself.80 Following Pascal’s lead, Hulme objects to any attempt to overwhelm the laws of one sphere with the inappropriate values of another. Spencer and Galton should not be permitted to impose their maps and charts upon the inner life – the interpenetration of actions, decisions, memories, visions, that comprise our waking state. Bergson and Nietzsche, though they and their followers tried, should not be permitted to claim that this non-rational flux granted direct insights into, or the power to mould, the ultimate truths of the universe. Their sense of a life force moving both in the mind of man and the mind of God is the most objectionable humanist folly, since it leads to a confidence in instinct more dangerous than confidence in reason. This invasion of the holy by earthly phenomena desecrates a space that cannot be known to human consciousness. This last circle, the religious zone of absolute values, is where Hulme halts, accepting the unknowable. The final position calls to mind Wittgenstein’s famous conclusion: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’81 Hulme’s use of Husserl and Moore is a notable development of his late writing. Moore provided a means to halt the sceptical impulse of Hulme’s earlier days, to establish the existence of essences, by showing that not all concepts are mere accretions of sense impressions presented as eternal

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

203

truths. There are objective truths that descend to us from above, rather than mere received notions, built up through habit and custom. His fourth essay in the ‘Notebook’ series acknowledges the value of this argument.82 Taking the series as a whole, we can reconstruct Hulme’s position. First, we see his repeatedly stated belief that an intuitive worldview precedes all philosophical apparatus. Such apparatus is never more than a superficial, retrospective rationalization of attitudes that are in fact impulsive. This is consistent both with the Pascalian logic of Sorel and with the Bergsonian and the pragmatist schools of philosophy. Second, despite its secondary status, there is a need for this equipment, to satisfy a natural appetite for understanding. Where is Hulme to get satisfactory infrastructure to take him out of his customary nominalism and to satisfy his realist impulse? The answer is provided, it seems likely, by C. K. Ogden, whose loan of Husserl’s works helped soften Hulme’s antipathy to ‘Neo-Realism’ by suggesting that subjective ideas can legitimately be treated as objective truths; this permits him to return to the Cambridge philosophy that he had previously found alien to his worldview.83 Moore provides, in his account of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, an argument for the objective existence of certain qualities, most famously ‘good’.84 One puzzling feature of Hulme’s references to Moore and the Cambridge school of NeoRealism is his still strongly held contempt for the Bloomsbury group, who also drew on this philosophy. Besides his attacks on Fry and Bell, Hulme had written scathingly of Russell’s essay ‘A Free Man’s Worship’ (1903) in ‘Notes on Bergson’.85 However, he now cited him, albeit fleetingly, alongside Husserl and Moore as one of his neo-realist sources.86 A certain ambivalence is clear, however, as he reiterates his contempt for the aforementioned work in ‘A Notebook’.87 Russell’s pacifism, as well as Bell’s, angered Hulme in the same period, leading to a public quarrel with Russell in the pages of the New Age and the Cambridge Magazine through to early 1916.88 It is clear, as Todd Avery has shown, that Bloomsbury liberals invoked these neo-realist philosophers for very different purposes to Hulme.89 Altogether, the neo-realist philosophy provided technical ideas, weapons or tools that Hulme sought out to arm himself, to defend a position that he took by instinct. As he put it, rigorous philosophical logic might be intimidating, but if we skip to the last paragraphs of even the most daunting tome, we see revealed the author’s prejudices and desires, their instinct which has all the time been the hidden operator working the mechanism of their argument. Once we see the suit of armour ‘running after a lady or stealing tarts from the pantry’, then we know there is a human impulse within.90

204

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Ramiro de Maeztu Ramiro de Maeztu, a member of the Spanish ‘generation of 1898’, made several visits as a newspaper correspondent to London in the pre-war years. Sympathetic to Guild Socialism, he was welcomed by the New Age circle as a contributor and guest and – perhaps through this network – was introduced to leading figures in the arts, including Walter Sickert and Wyndham Lewis. In 1912, he wrote a revealing article on Lewis’s breakthrough work of abstraction, Kermesse.91 This piece, critical in tone, seems to support Ardis’s case that Maeztu exemplified Guild Socialist hostility to modernism in the visual arts.92 In response, I want to emphasize Maeztu’s close friendship and collaboration with Hulme, during which Maeztu was also a leading theoretical contributor to Orage’s Guild Socialist project.93 This reveals a much more complex network of allegiances. It points to the place of modernism in a series of overlapping positions, in which ideas of art, literature and politics occur in numerous permutations. There is no reason why New Age contributors might not find each other’s ideas compatible in some areas, while remaining antagonistic in others. Bearing this in mind, it is worth noting here that Orage surely indulged in hyperbole, or perhaps wishful thinking, when he called Pound ‘the enemy of the New Age’.94 Orage’s attempt to define an integrated ‘New Age philosophy’ calls to mind Hulme’s similar determination to delineate a firmly ‘classical’ and ‘anti-humanist’ worldview and art. In fact, although Orage, like Hulme, thought he could ‘draw a line’ to exclude those he disliked from his personal position, these lines appear to have changed over time. Unlikely allies were found in certain quarters; enemies made expedient friends in the interests of maintaining a larger front. There were reasons for Orage’s hostility to Pound at the time. From 1913 to 1914, Pound was clearly at odds with Orage regarding the arts, and the latter detected even more profound differences of worldview as Pound consorted with the anarchists of the Stirnerian Egoist, linking his Imagism to their politics.95 But there is a danger in hypostasizing this encounter into a clash of fixed positions. In fact, both men’s ideas changed over time. Redman and Michael Coyle have shown how vital Orage was for Pound’s political development.96 It is well chronicled that by 1919, Pound was closely involved with Orage’s discovery of Social Credit, participating in some of the editor’s earliest discussions with the theory’s originator, Major C.H. Douglas.97 By the end of Orage’s life, Pound recognized that ‘for twenty-three years I don’t think that either of us took the other seriously as a critic of letters’, but at the same time, he paid tribute to the fact that Orage had

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

205

‘pulled his weight’ in what Pound saw as a collaborative endeavour, particularly in relation to economic questions.98 All this aside, Hulme’s work is a different case study, and one that sheds light on these kinds of overlapping positions, since he provides his own logic, via Sorel, for explaining links between left and right. Indeed, black-and-white divisions like Ardis’s overlook Hulme’s highly relevant analysis of ideological chimeras in his ‘Preface’ to Sorel and ‘War Notes’. As we have seen, Hulme proposes that ideologies are collections of concepts, non-rational in origin, which can be adopted, arranged and discarded according to no other logic but one’s temperament. In this view, received ideas of socialism, conservatism, liberalism and so on are merely the ossified form of particularly potent idea-clusters, which have grown so familiar they appear to be fused together. Interestingly, as noted above, present-day theorists agree that we should analyse not only the separable component concepts of any ideological position, but their evolution – the adoption and rejection of certain concepts, their reinterpretation and the reconfiguration of the whole.99 Ardis emphasizes Orage’s assertion that his opinions regarding art, literature and politics all hung together as one worldview.100 No doubt, to Orage’s mind, they did. But this internal coherence does not mean that his set of ideas was not changeable over time, as were the sets of ideas held by his supposed ‘enemies’, or that an overlap between his and their ideas could not occur. We are not dealing with ‘ready-made’ ideological categories of received ideas fixed together through some eternal logic. Developing Sorel, Hulme and Freeden’s similar thinking, we might argue that ideological coherence is an internal matter: there are no criteria to approve or disapprove of a conjunction of ideas except its wielder’s (or welder’s) satisfaction. An abstract painter might link his art to socialism, conservatism, nationalism or liberalism; a fascist might admire realism or post-impressionism; a Communist might admire Brecht or Balzac – so long as they can be reasoned, the links are arbitrary.101 An individual can subscribe to any mixture of ideas so long as the cluster as a whole can be coherently defended and, more importantly, promulgated. There is no fundamental barrier between parties, and Orage and Maeztu, despite their reservations about Vorticism, could profitably share concepts with Hulme on other grounds. The same applies to Pound, who shared his economic passions with Orage while never agreeing about art. Maeztu’s support for the Guild Socialist idea delighted Orage, Hobson recalled, and he gave him the space to develop enough material to publish, in 1916, a book, Authority, Liberty and Function in Light of the War (1916).102 The title reflects a distinction Maeztu was making between the German

206

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

and British outlooks, those of ‘Authority’ and ‘Liberty’, respectively, and his proposal for a third way, associated with the principle of ‘Function’.103 Historians keen to find in Maeztu the seeds of fascism overlook his objection to authoritarianism.104 In fact, the book can be seen in the pluralist tradition in British politics, following the example of Maitland, Acton, Figgis and more recently Hobson, G.D.H. Cole, Orage and Penty.105 In Maeztu’s view, exaggerated claims to temporal authority were born of the same humanist error as decadent Western ‘liberty’. On the one hand is an illusion of the goodness of human actions if orchestrated by an elite or leader, and on the other an illusion of the goodness of humanity if left to its own devices. Singleminded belief in either principle involves a form of romanticism.106 The principle of ‘function’ would instead permit the subordination of all parts of society to an objective and transcendent value system. Each individual, recognizing their place and role in an ordered society, would willingly participate in this harmonious whole.107 Maeztu cites Hulme to explain how a sense of fallenness underpinned this value system.108 In his theory, this notion supported ‘the two great principles of the Guild […] Limitation and Hierarchy’. Maeztu sees a belief in Original Sin as not only delimiting, but also preserving individuals: ‘the humblest of men is, after all, a man and not a beast and must be paid to live’. Meanwhile, ‘Hierachy divides and subdivides the members of the Guilds into apprentices, craftsmen, and masters.’109 At the same time, he, like Hulme, turned to the philosophical apparatus of Husserl and Moore to bolster his sense of an objective value system to which humanity could subordinate itself. Maeztu first discussed Moore in relation to these ideas on 2 September 1915, five months before Hulme cited him to similar effect in the fifth of the ‘Notebook’ series.110 Maeztu also brought new elements into the discussion of political pluralism from the French jurist Léon Duguit, later cited by Hulme, and showed how all these ideas could support Orage’s Guild Socialism.111 We thus see here how Maeztu provides a third, adjoining circle of ideas, linking, as in a Venn diagram, with Hulme and Orage. None of the three are identical, but they share components, and in particular, a theory of objective values. Maeztu bases his distinctions on a further argument about philosophy. There are two forms of worldview: one which values ‘things’, that is, abstract ideas and goals, above people, and another that places people above things. The Germans have placed ‘things’ above people, while the British, as liberal humanists, do the opposite. The danger is that the Germans will win owing to their greater discipline, their subordination of people to a ‘thing’, that is, the national cause.

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

207

The British must learn to place ‘things’ – abstract principles – above people, but keeping in view that ‘things’ are measured by their value to people. They must avoid falling into the German error of devaluing individuals or placing a human authority above them. The equality and sanctity of human life is not incompatible with their subordination to a higher authority.112 This calls to mind the tense, oscillating apprehension of both particulars and universals sought by Hulme, discernible in his apparently contradictory responses to abstraction in literature and art, described in earlier chapters. In Maeztu’s case, all this apparatus, for example Moore’s case for the existence of objective truths, creates an overall moral structure that outwardly resembles Catholicism. Orage, as we have seen, had a very sophisticated spiritual perspective, which enabled him to appropriate Christian terminology for his own purposes. He chose to ignore that Maeztu’s argument amounted to Catholicism.113 Hulme’s religious beliefs have been suggested by many of his contemporaries. Later, critics picked up on his use of the Original Sin theory. He described himself as an ‘Anglo-Catholic’, although Maeztu believed he was on the path to Catholicism when he died.114 When he published his book in 1916, Maeztu included a ‘Preface’ which best encapsulates the social and intellectual network in which Hulme now operated. In a list of acknowledgements, we see the overlapping circles that made up Maeztu’s particular ideological formation. There are the contributions from left and right: I owe to the New Age and its editor, Mr. A. R. Orage, the idea of the Guilds; to M. Léon Duguit that of objective rights; to Mr. G. E. Moore that of objective good; to Herr Edmond Husserl that of objective logic; and to Mr. T. E. Hulme the acknowledgement of the political and social transcendency of the doctrine of Original Sin. I wish to express my thanks to all, and also to Mr. J. M. Kennedy, who has shared with me the labour of giving my thoughts this English setting, and to Messrs. A. R. Orage and Rowland Kenney for their numerous corrections.115

Here, philosophical Neo-Realism and the doctrine of Original Sin provide the philosophical and moral logic to assert the limited nature and functional status of individuals; a basis to delimit but also to intensify, and formalize, individuals’ given roles in society. In practice, Orage’s Guild idea was a perfect match. It is revealing that Maeztu’s acknowledgement also records the outline of a social and intellectual network, listing what might have been company present at the Café Royal, where Hulme, Maeztu and Orage often shared a table. As noted above, Hulme could work closely with Maeztu in a philosophical and ethical discussion,

208

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

but they differed in other respects: Maeztu and Orage considered Hulme’s preferred aesthetic modernism ideologically unsound, while Hulme remained detached from the Guild idea. What one has to see is that despite Orage and Hulme’s verbal struggle to ‘draw a line’ around their respective positions – an exercise in Neo-Realism in itself – the politics of modernism did not comprise a rigid and impermeable set of ideas but overlapped with the various ideologies around them. Hulme was clearly content to participate in Orage’s circle on this basis. There are only some positions Hulme would revile entirely. Maeztu concludes his note by thanking Kennedy. The latter’s place at Hulme’s Café Royal table, as Orage’s trusty foreign correspondent, and a self-proclaimed Tory, is perhaps conceivable, but it may not be fanciful to detect a segregating line in the positioning of his name after those of the main protagonists. The Levy group remained somewhat set apart from the New Age circle: Hulme’s clash with Ludovici was so strident because their ideas were superficially similar, sharing names – ‘classicism’, ‘hierarchy’, ‘authority’, ‘order’ – yet the meaning of these terms had been ‘decontested’ in different ways, as Freeden puts it. It is the superficial affinity that really provokes Hulme’s anger: the battlelines are drawn here all the more intensely because of the apparent resemblance. One might analyse these forms of partial overlap or apparent resemblance through Hulme’s analysis of ideology as consisting of an algebraic form. As he argued in his ‘Translator’s Preface’, Socialism is W (working class movement) + D (Democracy). The two seem fixed together but can be separated.116 This in itself strikingly anticipates Freeden’s analysis of clusters of ideas. Applying the same logic to Orage, Hulme and Maeztu, we see they share elements A (a Pascalian commitment to an objective epistemology), B (an ethical commitment to Original Sin) and C (a pluralistic spirit in politics) but differ as regards D (the specifics of political practice) and as regards E (aesthetics). Similarly, in the case of Kennedy, and particularly Ludovici, we see they share element ideas with Hulme, identified above, but these are defined differently in Hulme’s usage. They appear only superficially similar. Hulme enjoyed the Sorelian paradox that a socialist could be opposed to democracy. It was again an example of discord, breaking up the customary reading of ideology as one thing or another. Hulme was drawn to Sorel, and in the same way replicated Sorel in his own social network, socializing with socialists, because he enjoyed this challenge to customary ideological categories. He enjoyed the discord Sorel created in the minds of his readers, for it broke up the ‘ready-made’, as Sorel put it himself, it challenged the easy connections

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

209

that would be made so rapidly.117 Sorel thwarted categorization, and appealed to Hulme for that reason. His brief interest in royalism took the logic a step further, although his alliance with Maurras proved unsustainable.

The meaning of authority Maeztu’s account of authoritarianism ran through his essays of early 1915, well before Hulme returned to literary life later that year.118 When the latter did begin writing again, his ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Sorel contains a revealing footnote acknowledging one possible meaning of ‘democracy’ to refer to ‘the true doctrine that all men are equal’. Hulme italicizes the word to show he is using it differently, and very specifically, ‘to indicate the views of the people who are so fond of so describing themselves’ – in other words, the complacent and naive doctrine of liberal individualism at which he continued to take aim.119 Hulme’s ‘War Notes’ picked up this new positive view of ‘freedom’, admiring the English taste for liberty in his third piece, on the possibility of conscription.120 His higher valuation of liberty and democracy was, admittedly, based on a careful definition of these terms to suit Hulme’s particular position, but revealingly, these remarks are accompanied by a growing aversion to authoritarianism, including that of certain writers he had earlier admired. It is worth remembering that Hulme had, in his ‘Tory Philosophy’ essays of 1912, specifically subscribed to ‘order and discipline’, along with the notion of a ‘necessary hierarchy of classes, with their varying capacities and duties’.121 However, in Hulme’s shifting position from 1915 to 1916, we see again that taking these words as fixed in their meaning is misleading: these are what we might now call ‘essentially contested concepts’.122 ‘Authority’, in Hulme and Maeztu’s writing, falls into two forms: a false humanist authoritarianism and a legitimate, transcendent, religious order.123 The subordination of people to an objective authority is distinct from the claims of a subjective human pretender. Human dictatorship offended Hulme: ‘the romantic nonsense of […] the slave and the master morality’.124 By 1915, he identifies it above all with the German State, but this dislike ties back into his contempt for the pre-war advocates of a Nietzschean elite, for the theory of two moralities, and for those Britons keen to declare themselves Übermenschen and demand the obedience of the masses.125 It is no accident that Nietzsche, during these early months of the war, had been identified with German militarism; indeed, for Orage, this link had been evident as early as 1910, when he described Nietzsche as ‘the lyrical Bismarck’.126

210

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

These reservations regarding Nietzsche had been clear for some time, then, in Hulme and Orage too. However, it was now dawning on Hulme that many writers of the pre-war radical right were entangled and implicated in forms of what he saw, and objected to, as a kind of humanist authoritarianism. He thus had to distance himself from certain authors he had previously admired. In the eighth of his ‘War Notes’ series, he identifies this error in Maurras and Action française.127

The meaning of liberty In the first and third of his ‘War Notes’, Hulme writes approvingly of the British tradition of liberty, echoing Maeztu’s comments on the English habit of thought that elevates men above things. But, again like Maeztu, he is disapproving of the English assumption that this liberty is somehow natural or inevitable. There is a difference between attacking liberty and attacking the assumption that liberty is a natural state.128 Maeztu had made the point that ‘things’ like liberty that have a human value require defending. Individuals must be willing to fight for things that have a human value. The English forget this.129 To Hulme’s mind, liberty has become a habit of the British through a combination of sheer luck, and through the willingness to fight for its defence. It is the assumption that liberty and democracy are normal and will inevitably increase over time that Hulme rejects. He returns to the theme in the fifth of the ‘War Notes’, in which he criticizes the liberal elite for assuming that their worldview is the natural one to be finally adopted by all those below.130 The seventh ‘War Note’ is perhaps the clearest case of his sympathy with Maeztu. Here, he argues that liberty must be fought for ‘in the field’, citing the English Civil War. In the same number of the New Age, there appeared the first of two articles by Maeztu entitled ‘On Right and Might’, in which he made very similar allusions.131 In the eighth of his ‘War Notes’, Hulme rejects statist authoritarianism in the form of the ‘organic society’. Here, his use of a kind of ‘diremption’ or ‘conceptual disaggregation’ is most vividly apparent. Hulme dissects the associations forged between ideas and proposes to reconstruct them according to his own particular preferences. He identifies the fallacy by which, having become used to two or more ideas occurring together, one fails to see that one or more of the cluster is dispensable without the loss of what is most valued.132 Again, we see the advance in the view of ideology, and how it can apply in fact to the writing of the intellectual history of this period. We need not put

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

211

ideologies into categories but can dissect them and identify the elements we want to keep and those we want to discard. Those kept can be brought into new combinations. Similarly, there is no need to put Sorel, Orage and Maeztu in one category and Hulme in another. Thus, in this piece, Hulme echoes Maeztu’s attacks on the German elevation of things above people, while allying himself more closely with Proudhon and democracy, distancing himself from Maurras and Action française. Surveying these references together, we can summarize. For Hulme, there were two notions of ‘liberty’. One was the soft, humanist notion prevalent since the Renaissance but increasingly pronounced in the nineteenth century, which saw all social development as moving inexorably to man’s advantage, and liberty as an objective natural state that will prevail. The route to liberty is to yield always, never to fight. Liberty is a matter of giving way: in Nietzsche’s terms, this is the liberal inheritance of a New Testament, a celebration of passivity and slave morality. The second notion of liberty is one requiring active defence, by no means objectively fixed or true. In this, Hulme was again close to Maeztu. As noted, on 23 December 1915, he wrote about liberty as defined by protagonists in the English Civil War, and in the same number, Maeztu made the same connection.133 Michael Whitworth has shown that the discussion was prompted by an article in the New Statesman, which argued against conscription as a betrayal of the liberty achieved by the Civil War.134 Both Hulme and Maeztu responded by arguing that the Civil War illustrated the value of a kind of liberty that has been won ‘in the field’, both quoting Milton on the nobility of this position.135 It was necessary to fight and indeed to compel the people of England to fight, to achieve this state of liberty. Hulme and Maeztu responded with similar references to the Putney Debates, the discussions held between the Parliamentary leaders and their men in the New Model Army, many of whom were Levellers. The discussion between Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s closest ally and son-in-law, the most eloquent of the Parliamentary leaders, and the Levellers, who were fomenting rebellion within the Army, has been identified as a crucial moment in the development of English democracy. Despite coming close to agreement, the talks ultimately failed. If they had succeeded, the relations that Ireton proposed, admitting the Levellers’ voice into what he envisaged as a constitutional monarchy, are reminiscent of a Sorelian harnessing of popular feeling to support the social order. As Whitworth shows, Hulme relied on the account provided in G. P. Gooch’s History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (1898), and it seems likely that Maeztu shared this source.136 One can roughly reconstruct how Hulme and

212

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Maeztu were provoked by the article and responded through reference to Gooch. It seems likely they discussed these ideas in conversation before writing their respective pieces in the same week. The significance of this for Hulme was that he was moving from the purely ethical criticism of Sorel towards more explicit politics. The name Proudhon was increasingly cited to convey the kind of ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ that Hulme now admired. In his ‘Preface’, which begins with a quotation from Proudhon’s Guerre et Paix (1861), Hulme refers in a footnote to the importance of ‘equality’ and also of ‘justice’. These are key terms used, with a very specific meaning, in Proudhon’s Guerre et Paix and, earlier, in De la Justice dans la révolution et dans l’Église (1858). Their meaning in Proudhon is somewhat obscure and variable, but the clearest point of reference is perhaps De la Justice, which proposes that justice cannot be understood as a metaphysical abstraction, but as the product of complex, individual experience.137 Similarly, in the eighth of his ‘War Notes’, Hulme stated that he had discarded his belief in Action française’s ‘organicism’ and was now a democrat in the Proudhonian sense. These references to Proudhon remain very Sorelian in character and align Hulme with a small group in Paris that worked at the cutting edge of avant-garde radical politics. Hulme was alluding here to Sorel’s politics again; it is unknown whether he was himself aware of the Cercle Proudhon, which was formed by Georges Valois in 1912.138 At this point, we get very close to the cluster of ideas identified by Sternhell as marking the ‘birth’ of fascism.139 Yet, in identifying himself with Proudhon and distancing himself from Maurras, Hulme was self-consciously moving away from ‘reactionary’ politics towards ‘democracy’ and the principles of ‘equality’ and ‘democracy’. In the same article, Hulme noted that ‘this war has greatly, to their own surprise, converted many to democracy’, and indeed, a more positive usage of this term is apparent in several of Hulme’s wartime articles.140 However, it should be noted that Hulme identifies this term with Proudhon, the representative of the Sorelian left–right conjunction that Sternhell identifies as proto-fascist.141 If Hulme advocates ‘democracy’, at the same time he calls Sorel and Proudhon democrats. The question is then how far are historians right to see the Sorelian brew of ideas as fascist, and whether we can reconcile this with Hulme’s description of it as democratic, and his emphasis on the key words ‘justice’ and ‘equality’. Proudhon’s combination of a conservative ethic and pluralist politics was evidently not fascist, although some commentators have sought to identify him

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

213

in that way.142 However, it is fairer to say that his ideas could be distorted to support such a tendency. The most recent biographer of Georges Valois argues that the Cercle Proudhon was a title adopted because Proudhon’s writing was ‘so unsystematic and contained so many contradictions that he could be used by people who might agree about little else’. This elasticity of interpretation made him attractive to Maurrasian as well as Sorelian readers.143 Members of Action française had admired Proudhon, as noted above, including him in the regular ‘Our Masters’ column in their newspaper and placing a wreath ceremonially on his grave at Montparnasse.144 However, while Hulme was still citing Pierre Lasserre in October 1915, one outcome of Hulme’s positioning in ‘War Notes’ as a Proudhonian democrat was that he distanced himself from Action française’s organic statism.145 This reflects how Proudhon could be read in different ways. For Hulme, there was a difference between Proudhon’s position and Maurras’s, and that difference lays in Proudhon’s pluralism as opposed to Maurras’s authoritarian organicism.146 As noted in Chapter 4, the horizontal interaction of guilds envisaged by Action française was scored through with vertical lines of authority bringing local communities under a single governing authority. Thus, it was only superficially similar to Proudhon’s system, which was set firmly against any such single vertical line of power. Proudhon was therefore closer in spirit to the syndicalists, and he remained a model for Sorel. Hulme’s sympathies seem to lie, then, with the spirit of a horizontal and cooperative pluralism, with its natural hierarchies, rather than the vertically governed one, at this point – in other words, with Sorel and Proudhon rather than Maurras and the authoritarianism he saw in Germany. There is a movement away from the organic state theory, and this too is informed by Maeztu’s analysis of ‘authority’ as implemented in Germany.147

Orage Orage congratulated Maeztu in early 1915 for emphasizing the links between economic and cultural vigour.148 Indeed, Hobson recalls that he ‘was in raptures’ over Maeztu’s contribution to Guild Socialist theory, so much so that Hobson felt obliged to read the latter’s work with care to find out what the fuss was about.149 Clearly, it made an impact on this most level-headed of the Guild theorists, for Hobson continued to cite Maeztu’s political theory through the 1920s and 1930s; he was keen to point to Maeztu as the progenitor of ‘functional socialism’ even in 1936, the year in which the latter was shot in Spain.150 Maeztu’s reputation was

214

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

soon tarnished with fascist associations, but the man himself, it should be noted, was not necessarily conscious of this affiliation: he claimed in an interview in La Gaceta literaria in 1927 that he was a socialist, proudly pointing to a reference to his name in Niles Carpenter’s 1922 history of Guild Socialism, which linked him to work by R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole.151 Orage commented regularly as Maeztu and Hulme’s columns appeared, his ‘Readers and Writers’ column adding a third voice to this public debate. He first wrote approvingly on Maeztu in response to the latter’s article ‘The Jealousy of the Guilds’ (29 April 1915). As Ardis notes, this exchange captures the firm bond between Orage and Maeztu.152 Once Hulme had begun writing again, Orage soon signalled his general approval of his and Maeztu’s emerging collaboration. This coincided with perhaps the most conspicuous moment in Maeztu and Hulme’s alliance, when both men contributed articles to the New Age on 23 December 1915, with shared sets of references to the jurist Léon Duguit, to G. E. Moore and to Russell, as well, as noted above, to a principle of ‘liberty’ forged in the English Civil War. Orage on this occasion cemented the tripartite conversation with his approval of ‘the most able expositions […] of a new philosophy […]. We are all following them with interest […]. The writers are turning over a new leaf in the book of thought’ but added his reservation about their neglect of the doctrine of redemption.153 On 13 April 1916, Orage chipped in again, once more identifying Hulme and Maeztu as exponents of a single ‘bellicose doctrine’. Now, he challenged their belittling of God and their belittling of man: May I add a query of doubt concerning the somewhat bellicose doctrine several of your contributors – perhaps led by Mr. Maeztu and ‘T. E. H.’ – are endeavouring to put into currency: the doctrine that principles must be fought for? To use theological language, a principle, presumably, is a truth for which God fights; and if it is of God, how can men either defeat or support it? To prove the need of such support it has to be assumed that God is not really all-powerful, but requires the help of man to maintain and to carry out His Will. I need not say how inconsistent this belittling of God is with the belittling of Man, which, apparently, your writers have repudiated the Renaissance to establish. God and Men are all weak together!154

There were differences between the three men, clearly, most of all concerning the relation of God to man, and the latter’s potential for self-improvement. This reflects the way that Orage positioned himself slightly differently to Maeztu and Hulme by emphasizing the principle of redemption. Over the following months, Orage continued to comment on Maeztu’s work, flagging up the publication of

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

215

his book as a major text in Guild Socialist theory, and then once again entering into a friendly quarrel with Maeztu during 1917.155 Orage’s most significant comment on Hulme and Maeztu’s joint project related to their neglect of the doctrine of redemption. As shown in Chapter 3, Orage’s belief was that the journey to salvation was hard but possible. He too drew lines dividing the animal world from the human and the human from the divine. But, in his view, these lines were not absolute. They were, however, intensely difficult to move across. Orage was a monist, but one whose sense of the slowness and difficulty of spiritual evolution made him strangely akin to a Christian. His sense was that no departments in life are watertight, that all blurs together: this is typical of the monism of the period, and of Orage’s great influence, Carpenter. But, like Carpenter, Orage’s spirituality resembled Christianity in many ways, in the insistence on subordinating the individual and on the hard work required to achieve spiritual ‘evolution’. Orage believed the journey was difficult, but Hulme didn’t think it possible at all. The difference recalls two Christian theodicies: the Augustinian and the Irenean. It seemed that Hulme had allowed no suggestion of such progress of individuals or society towards betterment or enlightenment. The attitude was harsh and justified a firm subordination of individuals to their functional role within society. In Maeztu’s work, this prioritization of function led to uncompromising remarks on the disposability of individuals in the name of the greater cause. Arguing for the ‘primacy of things’, he concluded that ‘the true foundation of democracy is the conviction that no man – emperor, pope, or workman – is entitled to any consideration other than that due to a possible instrument of the eternal values’. Moreover, disturbingly, ‘instruments are used when they are in good order, repaired when damaged, and thrown away when useless’.156 Orage was clearly aware that, although Maeztu’s intention was to provide an intellectual rebuttal of German authoritarianism, his recommended balance between the potency of German organization and the decadence of Western liberal humanism, based on the objective principle of Function, was in danger of slipping towards the devaluation of individual lives, into something that resembled authoritarianism in its manner and tone, although it claimed otherwise. While Orage took pleasure in Maeztu’s refinement of the Guild idea, he quite early on objected to this hint of carelessness regarding individuals. For example, in the debate over the ‘primacy of things’, he wrote: Some things at some time […] are of more importance than some men. But at other times some men are more important than some things. Everything

216

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

depends upon time, place, and circumstance […]. To assume beforehand that either is always to be preferred is to abdicate the office of moral judgment and to put ourselves in a kind of mortmain to an authoritarian theory. Men must be tested by things, things must be tested by men; for neither can be measured, as to their value, in their OWN terms.157

Too firm an insistence on the principle of Original Sin risked the emergence of an ‘authoritarian theory’. It had therefore to be counterbalanced by some sense of the sanctity of human lives. This was where Orage’s emphasis on redemption was significant. There had to be a means by which individuals and society grew towards some kind of goal, or felt that they could. In political terms, the subordination of individuals to collective causes was, for Orage, a means to permit the individual’s fruition as a person in their own sphere. To ignore this was to neglect the whole raison d’être of the Guild system. Orage was consistent in this high evaluation of individual freedom in his later political writing and called Mussolini’s fascism a ‘corrupt[ion]’ of the principles he had worked to develop before the war.158 Maeztu’s misstep was a conspicuous flaw in a logic Orage otherwise admired. There was a subtle difference between the kind of social equilibrium desired by Orage and the hints at something darker surrounding the principle of function. When a younger faction of Guild Socialists led by G. D. H. Cole rejected Orage’s state-led version of the doctrine in pursuit of a truly pluralistic system, this decision was moved in part by unease with the notion of the subordination of individuality.159 Looking back on his time as editor of the New Age in 1926, Orage concluded that no social system would work without some kind of authority beyond the human – without a sense of God. Proposals for radical social reform failed because ‘every such system assumes that man is accountable only to man’. How was this defect to be remedied but through the force of religious belief? And ‘what’, asked Orage, ‘is the essence of religion, that distinguishes it from even its most colourable imitations in the form of morality, neighbourliness, humanitarianism?’ I reply, quite simply, God […]. There can be no religion in the absence of God, though there may be God in the absence of religion! Religion I venture to define as the attempt to establish an ideal and conscious relation between man and God.160

Although only stated years later, this sense of need may shed light on his closeness to the Catholic Maeztu and to the Anglo-Catholic Hulme between 1915 and 1916. However, Orage’s journey was by no means over following this

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

217

brush with Chestertonian ‘orthodoxy’. On the death of Hulme, his compass spun again; he found in the mystic writers Ouspensky and, later, G. I. Gurdjieff, forms of spirituality, again on the ambiguous borderline between the psychological, the physiological and the mystic. Gurdjieff used these ideas to support his practice of cult leadership that had something in common with Mussolini’s reliance on charisma and carelessness for truth.161 Some members of the Guild Socialist milieu were attracted to Italian fascism, undoubtedly. Odon Por and Ezra Pound were two prominent cases.162 But others persisted in calling themselves socialists, and also in seeking a spiritual force above the temporal. These writers included Rowland Kenney, Maurice Reckitt, Philip Mairet and Vigo Demant, who formed the intellectual networks known as the Christendom Group and the Chandos Group. Their genus of politics is particularly subtle and there is no space to analyse it in depth here, but it could be described as a form of Christian pluralism. It is telling that T. S. Eliot was drawn to these circles, particularly during the 1930s. A larger study would further explore his points of contact with the ideas discussed here, from his early approval of Hulme and Maurras through to his participation in these networks, inheritors of the New Age circle.163 Despite the troubling tendencies that Orage perceptively noted early on, attempts to identify Maeztu as a proto-fascist are not wholly convincing.164 Although his subsequent development involves an accentuation of those errors that Orage rebuked, adding a depressing anti-Semitism – something entirely absent from Hulme’s thought – there are elements from Maeztu’s ‘idea-cluster’ that entered the British left separately and were there utilized by those who believed themselves to be diametrically opposed to fascism. As noted above, Maeztu himself was proud to be cited by historians in the same breath as such luminaries of the British Labour movement as Cole and R. H. Tawney.165 As noted, Hobson, throughout his life a firm socialist in the British tradition, wrote approvingly of Maeztu and his ideas as late as 1936, in his Functional Socialism.166 Kenney, Reckitt and Margaret Cole all credit Maeztu as an early theorist of a crucial idea for the anti-statist British left.167

Nieuwpoort Hulme joined the Royal Marine Artillery for training in March 1916, first in Portsmouth, and then in Cromarty. In February 1917, he was sent once again to Belgium.168 It is telling that, since his return from the front, he had sought a

218

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

commission to operate the heavy artillery that, as he noted in ‘Trenches: St. Eloi’, were ‘hidden, lying back miles’. In letters to Edward Marsh, he argued his case: a return to the trenches ‘would be extremely depressing’; his mathematical skills could be put to better use.169 Just as Hulme made the decision to subscribe to absolute theological values in his last pieces of 1915–1916, so, in his pursuit of a commission as an artillery officer, he sought the reassuring technical certainties of gunnery. Hulme’s reaction to the war, both in his writing and his military career, illustrates his preference for what he called the inner and outer regions of fixed law – respectively, theological and mathematic in character – and his abhorrence of the chaos in between.170 Indeed, while completing his book on Epstein and the ‘religious attitude’ in art, Hulme also found intellectual satisfaction in the science of aiming large guns over great distances. He hoped to write a book on this subject with his colleague, Captain J. H. Hollingsworth,171 one of the top graduates of the Cambridge Mathematics Tripos, credited in the RMA’s official history reports, as a ‘mathematical expert’.172 Hulme had become convinced, as he told Ashley Dukes in 1917, that the solution to the war was a clean, scientific shelling, ‘to kill Germans from nine miles away’.173 Herbert Read found, after his death, many notes ‘dedicated to the technical problems of artillery practice and to strategy in general’.174 This response to the mess of the European conflict brought Hulme back to an intellectual discipline he had discarded in 1903. In contrast to the trenches, he now lived and worked in the dunes of the Belgian coast. The guns that he operated were protected by concrete bunkers, dug into the sand. In the evening he returned to barracks where he could read in bed by electric light.175 He had removed himself from the chaos of a ‘muddy mixed zone’ to a dry, orderly world in which the enemy was abstract and unseen.176 Yet it was here that Hulme was killed by a shell on 28 September 1917. The mud and cinders that haunted him throughout his life broke into the region of mathematic clarity on the open beaches of Nieuwpoort.

Notes 1 See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, pp. 182, 185. 2 This text consists of a series of letters written to members of Hulme’s family between December 1914 and April 1915. First published as ‘Diary from the Trenches’ in Further Speculations, ed. by Samuel Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), pp. 147–69; repr. in CW, pp. 313–30. 3 See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 212.

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

219

4 William James, ‘Giovanni Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method, 3.13 (1906), 337–41 (p. 339). James repeats the quotation in ‘Lecture II: What Pragmatism Means’, in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), pp. 22–23. 5 See Adamson, ‘Modernism and Fascism’; Adamson, Avant-garde Florence; Gullace, ‘The Pragmatist Movement in Italy’; Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (dedicated to Prezzolini), pp. 88–97. For Papini’s friendship with James, see Golino, ‘Giovanni Papini and American Pragmatism’; Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (1948; Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), pp. 313–22. 6 James, ‘Giovanni Papini’, p. 338. 7 Giovanni Papini, Il Crepuscolo dei filosofi: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Comte, Spencer, Nietzsche (Milano: Societa Editrice Lombarda, 1906), pp. 1–183 on western philosophy; pp. 223–63 on Nietzsche; pp. 220, 266, 279. 8 James’s account of the ‘corridor theory’ is taken from Papini’s article ‘Pragmatismo messo in ordine’; repr. in Sul pragmatismo (saggi e ricerche) (Milan: Libreria Editrice Milanese, 1913), pp. 77–82 (p. 82). Prezzolini coined the term in ‘L’UomoDio’, pp. 3–4; Papini developed the idea in, Il Crepuscolo dei filosofi, pp. 220, 266, 279; Papini, ‘Dall’uomo a dio’ pp. 6–15. 9 ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion I’, p. 234; CW, p. 207. 10 See Chapter 4. 11 Schiller, ‘Another Congress of Philosophers’, p. 184. 12 Robert Wohl draws such a comparison in Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 1–4, 85–121, 160–202. 13 Jennings, Georges Sorel, p. 62; James H. Meisel, The Genesis of Georges Sorel (Ann Arbor, The George Wahr Publishing Company, 1951), p. 299. 14 Ontario, McMaster Library, Ogden Collection, Letter from Hulme to Ogden, 27 November 1911. 15 Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, pp. 148–49. 16 Ibid., pp. 139–43; Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals, pp. 26–27; Lyttleton, ‘Papini and Prezzolini’, Italian Fascism, p. 25. 17 Perry, Thought and Character, p. 319. 18 Freeden, ‘Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology’, pp. 154–55; Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 13–136, esp. pp. 43, 53, 71–73, 89–91; Freeden, Ideology, pp. 31–44, esp. pp. 43–44. 19 For his refinement of the notion of a ‘religious attitude’, see ‘A Notebook’, discussed below. 20 Hulme, ‘Cinders’, p. 19; ‘A Notebook II’, p. 138; CW, p. 425. 21 Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 212.

220

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

22 Ezra Pound, ‘Affirmations: Vorticism’, NA, 16.11 (14 January 1915), 277–78. For the Neoplatonic content of these pieces, see Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, p. 88. 23 James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 125–26. 24 T. E. Hulme, ‘Diary from the Trenches’, CW, p. 330; North Staffs [T. E. Hulme], ‘War Notes VI’ New Age, 18.7 (16 December 1915), 149–51 (p. 150); CW, pp. 353–58 (p. 354). 25 ‘War Notes I’, p. 29; CW, pp. 332–33. 26 See ‘Notes on Bergson IV’, CW, p. 136; and North Staffs [T. E. Hulme], ‘War Notes VII’, New Age, 18.8 (23 December 1915), 173–74; CW, pp. 358–63 (p. 360). 27 Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. ix–xviii; Sorel’s piece is listed on p. xvi. 28 Georges Sorel, ‘L’Évolution créatrice’, Le Mouvement socialiste, 22 (15 October 1907), 257–82; 22 (15 December 1907), 478–91; 23 (15 January 1908), 34–52; 23 (15 March 1908), 184–94; 23 (15 April 1908), 276–94. 29 Jennings, Georges Sorel, p. 84. 30 Hughes, Consciousness and Society, pp. 90–96. 31 Jennings, Georges Sorel, p. 22. 32 Georges Sorel, Le Procès de Socrate (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889), pp. 192–93. 33 Ontario, McMaster Library, Ogden Collection, Letter from Hulme to Ogden, 27 November 1911. See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 105. Further references to Sorel’s book use its French title, unless the discussion refers directly to Hulme’s translation. 34 ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’, p. 608; CW, p. 108. ‘On Progress and Democracy II’, pp. 179–80; CW, pp. 222–25. 35 Ontario, McMaster Library, Ogden Collection, Letter from Hulme to Ogden, 27 November 1911. 36 Hulme, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. 569; CW, p. 248. 37 ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion III’, pp. 266–67 (p. 267); CW, pp. 210–13 (p. 212). 38 Hulme, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. 570; CW, p. 250. 39 Ibid., pp. 251–52. 40 Sorel, Reflections, pp. 24–25, 85. This is the most recent scholarly edition, based on Hulme’s translation. 41 See Praz, The Romantic Agony; Swart, Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France. This point is particularly clear in Sorel’s chapter entitled ‘The Decadence of the Bourgeoisie and Violence’, Reflections, pp. 65–86. 42 Sorel pays tribute to Marx (p. 132) but remarks on elements of utopianism in his writing (pp. 171–72). His comments on Nietzsche are brief (pp. 230–34); Bergson is a major influence, pp. 5, 6, 25–30, 113–22, 133–34.

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

221

43 Sorel, Reflections, p. 5. For treatments of Sorel’s notion of diremption, see Richard Humphrey, George Sorel: Prophet Without Honor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 97–99; John Stanley, The Sociology of Virtue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 88–89; and Jeremy Jennings, Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of his Thought (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 7, 12. 44 Hulme, ‘Translator’s Preface’, pp. 569; CW, pp. 246–48. 45 Ibid., p. 569; CW, p. 247. 46 Ibid., p. 569. The wording is slightly different in CW, pp. 247–48. 47 Ibid., p. 569. The wording is slightly different in CW, p. 248. 48 Ibid., p. 569; CW, p. 248. 49 ‘Diremption’ OED, 2nd edn., 1989. Earlier version first published in New English Dictionary, 1896. 50 ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion III’, p. 266; CW, p. 210. 51 Freeden, ‘Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology’, pp. 154–55; Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 13–136; Freeden, Ideology, pp. 31–44. 52 Hulme, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. 569; CW, p. 248. 53 ‘War Notes VIII’, p. 197; CW, pp. 364–65. 54 Kadlec, ‘Pound, BLAST, and Syndicalism’, p. 1025; Ezra Pound, ‘Suffragettes’, The Egoist, 1 (1 July 1914), 254–55 (p. 255). 55 Garver, ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’, p. 140. 56 Sorel, ‘Letter to Daniel Halévy’, pp. 24–26, 28. 57 On myth and its differences from utopianism, see Sorel, Reflections, pp. 28, 29, 91, 112–19, 129, 140–41. See also Jennings, Sorel, pp. 134–42. 58 On ‘warmly-coloured images’, see Sorel, Reflections, p. 140. On modernist usage of montage, see Clearfield, These Fragments I Have Shored, pp. 9, 10, 11, 15–16. 59 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram’ (1929), in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. by Jay Leda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), pp. 28–44. 60 Hulme, ‘A Tory Philosophy I’, p. 295; CW, p. 235; ‘Epstein and the Critics’, p. 252; CW, pp. 259–60. 61 Csengeri, ‘Introduction’, CW, pp. xxx–xxxiii; p. 417. 62 Rae, Practical Muse, pp. 219–22. 63 Gasiorek, ‘Towards a “Right Theory” of Society’, pp. 149–68 (p. 166). 64 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. by W. F. Trotter (London: J.M. Dent, 1908), fragment 233. For a study of renewed interest in Pascal around the time of the Catholic Revival in France, and his particular appeal for Bergsonian and Sorelian thinkers, see Dorothy Eastwood, The Revival of Pascal: A Study of His Relation to Modern French Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). 65 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, pp. 37, 39, 40, 41. 66 Gasiorek, ‘Towards a “Right Theory” of Society’, p. 153. 67 Rae makes this observation in Practical Muse, p. 220.

222

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

68 T. E. H. [T. E. Hulme], ‘A Notebook I’, New Age, 18.5 (12 December 1915), 112–13 (p. 113); CW, pp. 419–21 (p. 421). 69 ‘A Notebook I’, p. 113; CW, pp. 421–22. 70 Orage, ‘In Defence of Agnosticism’, pp. 510–17. 71 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 147. 72 ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, CW, pp. 59–73 (p. 62). 73 See Chapter 3. 74 A. R. Orage, ‘Readers and Writers’, New Age, 18.8 (23 December 1915), 181–82 (p. 182). 75 ‘A Notebook II’, pp. 137–38; CW, pp. 423–27. 76 See, for example, Edwards, ‘The Imagery of T. E. Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks’, pp. 24–25. 77 Pascal is mentioned in ‘A Notebook I’, pp. 112–13; CW, p. 420; ‘A Notebook III’, NA, 18.7 (16 December 1915), 158–60; CW, p. 432; ‘A Notebook VI’, NA, 18.13 (27 January 1916), 305–07; CW, p. 445. 78 Pascal, Pensées, fragment 793. 79 Eastwood, The Revival of Pascal, p. 46. 80 See ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion I’, p. 234; CW, p. 207; Ferguson suggests that Hulme’s visits to his aunts in an Anglo-Catholic nunnery, and his purchase there of a penny cathechism, are suggestive of religious leanings; he later notes the discovery on Hulme’s person, after his death, of a scrap of paper marked with words from the Book of Common Prayer. See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, pp. 109–11, 270. 81 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 7. On Hulme’s affinities with Wittgenstein. See Andrew Thacker, ‘A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language’, in T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, ed. by Andrzej Gasiorek and Edward Comentale (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 39–55; Csengeri, ‘Introduction’, CW, pp. xxix–xxx. 82 T. E. H. [T. E. Hulme], ‘A Notebook IV’, NA, 18.8 (23 December 1915), pp. 186–88, esp. p. 187; CW, p. 435. 83 See Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, pp. 224–27; ‘A Notebook II’, pp. 137–38. CW, pp. 423–27. For an account of early twentieth-century ‘Neo-Realism’ of Moore, Russell, et al., see Christian Piller, ‘The Neo-Realism in Ethics’, in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 277–88. 84 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), pp. 38–45. 85 T. E. Hulme, ‘Notes on Bergson V’, New Age, 10.17. (22 February 1912), 401–03 (p. 403); CW, pp. 146–53 (p. 151). 86 ‘A Notebook IV’, pp. 186–88, esp. p. 187; CW, p. 435; ‘A Notebook V’, NA, 18.10 (6 January 1916), 234–35 (p. 234); CW, pp. 440–43 (pp. 435, 441, 442). 87 ‘A Notebook IV’, p. 187; CW, p. 436.

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

223

88 Writing as ‘North Staffs’, Hulme attacks Bell’s pacificist writing in ‘War Notes X’, NA, 18.11 (13 January 1916), 246–47; and Russell’s in ‘War Notes XI’, NA, 18.12 (20 January 1916), 269–70 (p. 270); CW, p. 384. There is no space here to recount his quarrel with Russell, recorded in ‘War Notes’, CW, pp. 331–415. 89 Todd Avery, ‘Above Life: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and Trajectories of Ethical AntiHumanism’, in T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, ed. by Andrzej Gasiorek and Edward Comentale (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 179–86. 90 ‘A Notebook III’, p. 159; CW, p. 431. 91 Ramiro de Maeztu, ‘Expressionism’, New Age, 14.4 (27 November 1913), 122–23: ‘I had been introduced by Mr. Walter Sickert to Mr. Wyndham Lewis’ (p. 122). 92 Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Confict, p. 159. 93 For example, Orage’s first lengthy response to Maeztu cites him as a standard bearer of the New Age philosophy: ‘Senor Ramiro de Maeztu’s article in last week’s issue ought not to pass without our special attention. It links the literary mission of the New Age with the economic and the political.’ ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 17.1 (6 May 1915), 13–14 (p. 13). 94 ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 14.2 (13 November 1913), 51. 95 Beasley makes this point particularly clearly in Ezra Pound and Visual Culture, pp. 78–111. 96 Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, pp. 17–50; Coyle, ‘A Profounder Didacticism’, pp. 7–28. 97 Stock, Life of Pound, p. 221; Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, pp. 51–75. 98 Ezra Pound, ‘Obituary: A. R. Orage: In the Wounds’, The Criterion, 14.56 (April 1935), 440. The latter phrase comes from the title of the first obituary that Pound wrote for Orage, entitled ‘He Pulled His Weight’, New English Weekly, 6.5 [A. R. Orage Memorial Number] (15 November 1934), 109. 99 Freeden, ‘Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology’, pp. 154–55; Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 13–136; Freeden, Ideology, pp. 31–44. 100 Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, p. 157. 101 For example, the discrepancy between Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno’s accounts of what kind of art best represented Marxist priorities: the nineteenth-century realist novel, or the alienating strategies of a Brecht or Beckett. See Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 65–70. 102 Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left, p. 180. 103 His book devotes each of its three parts to these ideas, the first dealing with ‘Authority and Power’, mostly concentrating on German political culture (pp. 11–101); the second dealing with ‘Liberty and Happiness’, commenting on British liberalism (pp. 107–92); and the third setting out Maeztu’s theory of ‘Function and Values’ (pp. 195–282).

224

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

104 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London: Harmondsworth Penguin, 1965), pp. 59, 947. 105 See Stears, Progressives, for an overview. 106 Ramiro de Maeztu, Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of the War: A Critique of Authority and Liberty as the Foundations of the Modern State and an Attempt to Base Societies on the Principle of Function (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1916), pp. 11–19, 183–90. 107 Maeztu, ‘The Jealousy of the Guilds’, NA, 16.26 (29 April 1915), 687–88; Maeztu, Authority, pp. 195–203 (p. 196). 108 Ramiro de Maeztu, ‘The End of Romanticism’, NA, 17.22 (30 September 1915), 521; Maeztu, Authority, pp. 183–84, 190. 109 Maeztu, ‘The Jealousy of the Guilds’, 687–88 (p. 687); Maeztu, Authority, pp. 183–84, 190. 110 Ramiro de Maeztu, ‘Beyond the Barriers of Liberty and Authority’, New Age, 17.18 (2 September 1915), 424–25 (p. 424); Maeztu, Authority, pp. 5, 64, 136, 188. ‘A Notebook V’, pp. 234–35; CW, pp. 440–43. 111 Maeztu cites Duguit in several New Age articles and in Authority, pp. 5, 189, 212, 215, 218, 220, 249. Hulme cites Duguit in a footnote in the revised version of his ‘Translator’s Preface’ p. 250. 112 For the identification of these ideas with Germany and Britain, see one of his earliest articles of 1915, ‘England and Germany: Two Types of Culture’, NA, 16.12 (21 January 1915), 303–04. The contrast is a recurring theme through the pieces later collected in book form. For the later debate concerning the ‘primacy of things, see Ramiro de Maeztu, ‘On the Primacy of Things I–III’, New Age, 17.26 (28 October 1915), 617–19; 18.22 (30 March 1916), 514–16; 18.24 (13 April 1916), 574–74; 19.1 (4 May 1916), 22, repr. in Authority, pp. 243–55. Maeztu also defended his position in the correspondence pages: Ramiro de Maeztu, ‘The Primacy of Things’ [Letters], New Age, 18.24 (13 April 1916), 574–74; 19.1 (4 May 1916), 22; NA, 20.7 (14 December 1916), 158–59; NA, 20.15 (8 February 1917), 358–58. 113 See Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left, p. 180. 114 Texas, Harry Ransom Research Centre, Hynes Collection, Ashley Dukes, interview with Samuel Hynes. 19 January 1954. Quoted by Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 108. Hull History Centre, Hulme Collection, DHU 3, letter from Ramiro de Maeztu to Kate Lechmere, 28 April 1918. Quoted by Jones, Life and Opinions, p. 142. 115 Maeztu, Authority, p. 5. 116 Hulme, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. 569; CW, p. 246–48. 117 Sorel, Reflections, p. 7. 118 Maeztu contributed pieces to the New Age at roughly fortnightly, sometimes weekly, intervals from 21 January 1915 until 1919. Hulme published nothing between his return from Belgium in April 1915 and the publication of his ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Sorel on 14 October 1915, but Maeztu refers

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

119 120 121 122 123

124 125

126 127 128 129

130 131 132 133 134 135 136

225

approvingly to Hulme in late September 1915, suggesting that they were already exchanging ideas in conversation. See Maeztu, ‘The End of Romanticism’, pp. 521–22 (p. 521). Hulme, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. 570. The note recurs, with slightly different wording, in the later version of this text, CW, p. 251. North Staffs [T. E. Hulme], ‘War Notes III’, New Age, 18.4 (25 November 1915), 77; CW, pp. 342–45. Hulme, ‘A Tory Philosophy I’, p. 295; CW, p. 235. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, pp. 167–98. Maeztu makes this distinction using the examples of ‘Authority’ as represented by German political culture; and ‘Function’, which he identifies with the Guild principle. See Ramiro Maeztu, ‘On Right and Might I–II’, NA, 18.8 (23 December 1915), 178–80; NA, 18.10 (6 January1916), 224–26; repr. in Authority, pp. 63–79; Maeztu, ‘The German Heresy I–IV’ in four parts: I, 18.12 (20 January 1916), 273–75; 18.14 (3 March 1916), 320–22; 18.16 (17 February 1916), 368–69; 18.18 (2 March 1916), 417–18; repr. in Maeztu, Authority, pp. 11–53. Hulme, ‘A Tory Philosophy I’, p. 295; CW, p. 235. North Staffs [T. E. Hulme], ‘War Notes VIII’, NA, 18.9 (30 December 1915), 197–99; CW, pp. 363–70. This contempt is perhaps most evident in his remarks on Ludovici in ‘Epstein and the Critics’, p. 252; CW, pp. 259–60. Orage, ‘Nietzsche: The Lyrical Bismarck’, pp. 304–05. See Milburn, The ‘Deutschlandbild’ of A. R. Orage and the ‘New Age’ Circle, pp. 57, 143–46. ‘War Notes VIII’, p. 197; CW, p. 365. ‘War Notes I’, p. 30; CW, pp. 331–32; ‘War Notes III’, p. 77; CW, pp. 342–45. See Maeztu, ‘On the Primacy of Things’ I–IV, 617–19; 18.22 (30 March 1916), 514–16; 18.24 (13 April 1916), 574; 19.1 (4 May 1916), 22, repr. in Maeztu, Authority, pp. 243–55. North Staffs [T. E. Hulme], ‘War Notes V’, New Age, 18.6 (9 December 1915), 125–26; CW, pp. 349–53. ‘War Notes VII’, p. 174; CW, p. 362; Maeztu, ‘On Right and Might I’, p. 179. ‘War Notes VIII’, pp. 197–98; CW, pp. 363–65. ‘War Notes VII’, p. 174; CW, p. 362; Maeztu, ‘On Right and Might I’, p. 179. Michael Whitworth, ‘T. E. Hulme’s Quotations from Milton and Ireton’, Notes and Queries, 43.4 (1996), 441–43. Maeztu, ‘On Right and Might I’, p. 179. ‘War Notes VII’, p. 174; CW, p. 362. G. P. Gooch, The History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898). Gooch’s account was one of the first to make use of the newly published record of the Putney Debates, discovered among the Clark Papers at Worcester College, Oxford. I am grateful to Lesley Le Claire for her account of this discovery and its significance. Private Conversation.

226

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

137 Proudhon, De la Justice dans la révolution et dans l’Eglise (Paris: Librairie de Garnier Frères, 1858). See George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), pp. 203–13. 138 Paul Mazgaj, Action Française and Revolutionary Syndicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 175–77. 139 Sternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology, pp. 233–313. 140 ‘War Notes VIII’, p. 414; CW, p. 365. 141 See Hulme, ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. 569; CW, pp. 246, 251, 252; ‘War Notes VII’, p. 174; CW, p. 363; ‘War Notes VIII’, pp. 197; CW, pp. 364, 365; ‘War Notes X’, p. 247; CW, p. 378; North Staffs [T. E. Hulme], ‘War Notes XIII’, NA, 18.14 (3 February 1916), 317–18 (pp. 317, 318); CW, pp. 391–96 (pp. 391, 395). 142 See for example J. Selwyn Schapiro, ‘Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Harbinger of Fascism’, American Historical Review, 50.4 (July 1945), 714–37. 143 Douglas, From Fascism to Libertarian Communism, p. 29. 144 Mazjag, Action Française, pp. 176–78, 184–85, 192. 145 Hulme cites Lasserre in ‘Translator’s Preface’, p. 570; CW, p. 249; but he cites Proudhon much more frequently from 1915 to 1916. 146 ‘War Notes VIII’, p. 197; CW, pp. 364–65. 147 Maeztu, ‘The German Heresy’, I–IV, NA, 18.12 (20 January 1916), 273–75; NA, 18.14 (3 February 1916), 320–22; NA, 18.16 (17 February 1916), 368–69; NA, 18.18 (2 March 1916), 417–18; Maeztu, Authority, pp. 11–103. 148 ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 17.1 (6 May 1915), 13. 149 Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left, pp. 180–82. 150 S. G. Hobson, Functional Socialism (London: Stanley Nott, 1936), pp. 15–16, 27, 30–31. 151 Giménez Caballero, ‘Conversación con un camisa negra, Ramiro de Maeztu’, La Gaceta Literaria, 4 (15 febrero 1927), 1. For the comparison to Tawney and Cole, see Niles Carpenter, Guild Socialism: An Historical and Critical Analysis (New York; London: D. Appleton, 1922), p. 263. 152 ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 17.1 (6 May 1915), 13. Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, p. 159. 153 ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 18.8 (23 Dec 1915), 181. 154 A. R. Orage, [R. M.], ‘Men and Things [Letter]’, New Age, 18.24 (13 April 1916), 574–75. 155 For example, Orage responded to Maeztu’s writing in ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 19 (3 August 1916), 326–27 and remarked favourably on the publication of Maeztu’s Authority, in ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 20.8 (21 December 1916), 182–84; he adds further commentary in ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 20.13 (25 January 1917), 302–03; ‘Readers and Writers’, NA, 20.16 (15 February 1917), 373–74. 156 Ramiro de Maeztu, ‘On the Primacy of Things’, NA, 18.22 (30 March 1916), 514–16 (p. 516); Maeztu, Authority, p. 255. 157 R. M. [A. R. Orage], ‘Men and Things’ [Letter], 574–75.

‘War Notes’, Sorel and Maeztu

227

158 A. R. Orage, ‘Notes of the Week’, New English Weekly, 3.22 (14 September 1933), 505–08 (p. 508); repr. in Political and Economic Writings, ed. by Montgomery Butchart (London: Stanley Nott, 1936), p. 221. 159 G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, 7 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1958–67), II: The Second International, 1889–1914, 246–48, esp. p. 247. 160 Orage, ‘Editor’s Progress IV, 456–57 (p. 457); repr. NA, 38.25 (22 April 1926), 295–96 (p. 296). 161 See James Webb, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers (New York: Putnam, 1980); Taylor, Gurdjieff and Orage. 162 On Por’s fascist connections, and his correspondence with Pound, see Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, pp. 18, 123, 156, 169, 175. 163 For an account of the ‘Christendom’ and ‘Chandos’ Groups, see Maurice Reckitt, As It Happened, pp. 251, 279–81. On Eliot’s involvement, see Roger Kojecky, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (London: Faber, 1971), pp. 76, 79–81, 113, 153–55, 171–73, 220. See also Harding, The Criterion, pp. 191–92; Stefan Collini, ‘The European Modernist as Anglican Moralist: The Later Social Criticism of T. S. Eliot’, in Enlightenment, Passion and Modernity, ed. by Robert Dietle and Mark S Micale (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 207–29. 164 Martin Nozick, ‘An Examination of Ramiro de Maeztu’, PMLA, 69 (September 1954), 719–40. 165 Caballero, ‘Conversación con un camisa negra, Ramiro de Maeztu’, p. 1; Carpenter, Guild Socialism, p. 263. 166 Hobson, Functional Socialism, pp. 15–16, 27, 30–31. 167 Kenney, Westering, pp. 202, 204; Reckitt, As It Happened, pp. 141, 142–43; Margaret Cole, ‘Guild Socialism and the Labour Research Department’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville, Essays in Labour History 1886–1923 (London: MacMillan, 1971), pp. 269. 168 Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 265. 169 Hulme to Edward Marsh, quoted in Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 217. 170 ‘A Notebook II’, p. 138; CW, p. 425. 171 Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 293 n.18. 172 H. E. Blumberg, Britain’s Sea Soldiers: A Record of the Royal Marines during the War, 1914–1919. (Devonport: Swiss, 1927), p. 426. 173 Texas, Harry Ransom Research Centre, Hynes Collection, Ashley Dukes, interview with Samuel Hynes. 19 January 1954. Quoted by Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 268. 174 Read, ‘Introduction’, Speculations, pp. x–xi. 175 Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, p. 266. 176 ‘A Notebook II’, p. 138; CW, p. 425.

Conclusion

Hulme’s ideas soon entered academic literary discourse, partly through the work of Cambridge contemporaries like C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, but also through the next generation of alert undergraduates who adopted his aesthetic principles with enthusiasm. W. H. Auden, a keen reader of Eliot’s Hulmean dicta in The Criterion, recalled how across Oxford quads of the late 1920s, ‘dogmatic words rang clear/“Good poetry is classic and austere” ’.1 Through such avenues, Hulmean attitudes helped shape the discipline of English Literature up to the present day. If British artists retreated from their pre-war spirit of experimentation, with Epstein and Bomberg notably returning to representative work, the purchase of In the Hold and Mud Bath by the Tate for display alongside works by Epstein and Lewis represents a firmly Hulmean presence in the national collection, one surveyed again recently in a major international retrospective of 2011 and in continuing scholarship.2 It must be recalled, however, that Hulme considered these works to be illustrations or signals of a new philosophical stance, of a shift in outlook akin to the Renaissance. The degree of that worldview’s impact on present day thought is more questionable. Were Hulme and his circle ‘the first men of a Future that has not materialized […] a “great age” that has not “come off ” ’, as Lewis put it, bidding vainly to establish an ‘alternative modernity’ in the place of the actually existing one, as Roger Griffin has suggested?3 If Hulme was ‘the forerunner … of the twentieth century mind’, as Eliot put it, was the germination of that mind brought abruptly to an end, its legacy lost in the mud of the war?4 There is limited profit in trying to draw direct lines of influence or indebtedness between Hulme and the mainstream of Western political theory today, but it is possible to talk about the exchange and descent of conceptual components, or intellectual DNA, to use a genetic metaphor.5 The place of the New Age and Guild Socialism in the history of modern AngloAmerican pluralism (as identified in a political tradition running from its Victorian proponents, Lord Acton and F. W. Maitland, through to its postwar advocate Harold Laski) is assured, as histories by Marc Stears and Mark Bevir have made clear.6 Although Hulme called himself a ‘pluralist’, his name is unlikely to be found in such studies: his pluralism was philosophical – more

230

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

specifically, Jamesian or Bergsonian. An apparent disjunction in intellectual histories separating treatments of philosophical and political ‘pluralism’ belies the recognizable correspondence between the two. It has been recognized, however, notably by the political philosopher William Connolly in his 2005 work Pluralism, and the correspondence has been remarked specifically in relation to modernist writing, notably by David Kadlec.7 On the other hand, the complexity of variation among the historical field of ‘pluralisms’ is undeniable: this is another loose category. Thus, the connections between Orage and Hulme described in the foregoing pages constituted no simple alliance but involved a number of overlapping conceptual components, leading to a form of ‘family resemblance’ between two distinct ideologies – what Connolly in an earlier work describes as a ‘cluster’ of concepts adjoining at different points.8 This temporary mirroring might be compared to the unstable, pre-war union of different corporatist ideologies in France, at a time when Proudhonian, syndicalist advocates of self-governing industries briefly seemed willing to accept the benign, cohesive influence of a monarch. If the resulting collaboration of Neo-Royalists and Syndicalists faltered, it was because in the Neo-Royalist mind, the autonomy of such projected working collectives was firmly subordinated to vertical lines of power descending from a restored monarchy. Similarly, in Britain, a field of Guild Socialists and conservatives placed differing degrees of emphasis on horizontal lines of communal association and vertical lines of authority; some of them coming perilously close to a politics of dictatorship, increasingly indistinguishable from fascist authoritarianism as first manifested in Italy. But for many on the left, and in the one-nation Tory camp, there was a valid role for a national executive to license and guarantee the grass-roots structures formed by independent working collectives, and to do so in the name of a higher power in turn, whose transcendence precluded human intervention or domination over the system as a whole. Hulme declared himself a philosophical pluralist just at the moment he came closest to declaring himself as a Tory and a believer in Original Sin. As a Jamesian pluralist, who saw the world as consisting of an irreducible and unorganizable sense data, he saw the Tory social system as a necessity – not as an assertion of eternal truths, but as the formulation of a tool to permit human organization. His Toryism was one founded on this logic, not only accepting the proliferation of truths and perspectives among large peoples, but also seeking a way of organizing and improving a consequently turbulent human population, making their condition bearable, and even aesthetically rewarding, by containing, and

Conclusion

231

paradoxically gaining energy from, the fractious irresolution of competing values, appetites and desires. This pluralism drew on Sorel’s politics of myth, but in its reliance on transcendent authority chimed with Catholic social theory, and it also inspired a form of Anglican socialism as noted in the previous chapter. The question remains of how many conceptual components are extricable from a project that clearly had the potential to tilt dangerously towards authoritarian power structures, as the later career of Maeztu demonstrated. (Hulme’s insistence in 1915 on the equal status of man and the need to fight for democratic freedoms suggests he was developing away from this error, but the point is moot.) One line of descent runs through a form of Christian politics that still has currency, although this line of descent involves the rearrangement of certain key concepts. Orage began this process, although he left it to others to continue. Although he was not in complete agreement with Hulme and Maeztu, and recognized the dangers of their discourse, his debate with them in 1915–1916 did involve a genuine exchange between apparent opponents and a collaboration in formulating certain conceptual components common to them both. These key ideas are derived from the theological doctrines of the Fall and Redemption. Orage cited the former along with Maeztu and Hulme, but his colleagues had too little engagement with the latter for his satisfaction. The meanings each man gave to these terms may well have differed – these were, to use Donald Gallie’s term, ‘essentially contested concepts’.9 But the humility of the Fall doctrine, the sense that humanity was fundamentally limited in its capacity for self-organization and improvement, was mitigated in Orage’s mind by a faith in ultimate redemption – the motivating myth, at least, of grace – the goal towards which socialists must fight, even knowing they may never see the fruit of that labour. This is a difference between a recognition of difficulty and limitation, and an insistence on damnation. The use of Christian terminology by these loosely associated thinkers permitted a seeming return, in their own work and in that of their inheritors, to religious orthodoxy. While Orage moved back towards ‘New Age’ philosophies after Hulme’s death, and the latter died before formally affirming his faith, others in the New Age circle who took these ideas up included avowedly Christian pluralists such as Maurice Reckitt, Vigo Demant, Philip Mairet and the members of the Chandos, Christendom and Christian Sociology groups. Of these networks, T. S. Eliot is the most prominent participant, whose politics are more complex than some imagine: as Stefan Collini has underlined, Eliot’s position was by no means authoritarian, but gravitated towards a kind of pluralism.10 By the 1930s, his social theories were being developed within a discussion group known as

232

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

The Moot, including Karl Mannheim, Karl Polanyi and John Middleton Murry, which set out to restore a religious component to British political life. Recent scholarship on the Moot recognizes this group’s contribution to the religious revival that occurs within, and perhaps exemplifies, the modern movement.11 Eliot’s contributions were not far removed from the position taken in France by Jacques Maritain.12 Thus, the religious dimension of Hulme and Orage’s thinking brought them close to prominent Christian theorists – on one hand, to Chesterton, Belloc and Maritain; and later, via Reckitt, Kenney and Demant, to an explicitly Anglican socialism. From that later generation, the conceptual DNA may be traced through to contemporary thought, arguably to the Radical Orthodoxy movement developed in recent years by John Milbank, and its political correlates, whether Milbank’s preferred Blue Socialism or Philip Blond’s Red Toryism.13 Indeed, Milbank notes that the secular distinction between right and left does not apply in the formulation of their ideology. Their work constitutes a renewed attempt, with a knowing debt to the Edwardian debate, to combat an impoverished secularized liberalism by re-imbuing British politics with a religious dimension.14 Another strategy is more pragmatic, recognizing the social function of religious practice, but retaining a Jamesian detachment from judging its truth value. The choices here might be reflected in certain critical approaches: Roger Griffin has presented modernism, in both its artistic (or ‘epiphanic’) and its political (or ‘programmatic’) forms as an attempt to cater for a deep-rooted religious impulse, implying the irrelevance of its fundamental nature. His assumption is that Christianity was by the early twentieth century an outmoded worldview in the West, and that the secularizing process had left a nagging psychological need for a stable ‘sacred canopy’ which various modernisms (most virulently, fascism) responded to with ‘ersatz’ myths of regeneration and rebirth.15 Erik Tonning builds on this but makes the counter-argument that Christianity remained a ‘live’ alternative to secularized liberalism and was seen as such by a number of modernists who turned back towards religious orthodoxy.16 While it is possible to read Hulme’s faith as a pragmatic measure, this study has made the case that his faith involved a real commitment, a Pascalian leap of faith. That said, the case for theological authenticity in modernist statements of faith should be read alongside the powerful sense of pluralism discussed above: James’s account of religious experience is exemplary of this double-thinking. The importance of myth as a binding agent that reconciles seemingly social differences brings this idea close to what might be termed ‘agonistic liberalism’.

Conclusion

233

There are other, non-Christian, forms of engagement with this problem in contemporary political philosophy: for example, Isaiah Berlin’s account in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ of a liberalism of competing values, refined by John Gray, whose recent work places a great emphasis on political utility of the theological principle of the Fall, despite its author’s avowed atheism.17 Similarly, Connolly’s powerful accounts of pluralism and the dangers of an oppressive secular liberalism have drawn on both Bergson’s time philosophy and James’s defence of religious freedoms, texts that bring him remarkably close to Hulme.18 Bergson’s philosophy sheds light on what Connolly calls a ‘multi-dimensional pluralism’, which sees the multitude of memories, anticipations, sense impressions and concepts as continually arising, merging and altering individuals’ thought processes. This flux of impulses and recollections must be sensitively represented in a pluralistic politics that attempts to cater for and reconcile a continually shifting multiplicity of concerns and desires.19 Connolly thus recommends an agonistic, or ‘bicameral’ liberalism – the notion of standing within one ‘room’ of beliefs, but accepting that other individuals occupy other chambers with a similar conviction of their reality. (This might be described as an updated version of Papini’s ‘Corridor Philosophy’.)20 It was James and Bergson who primarily informed Hulme’s political theory, and he remained a pluralist even through his Tory writing. Bearing this in mind, it is possible to identify Hulme’s Toryism as containing conceptual strands that occur also on the left, in Guild Socialism, and in a form of liberal conservatism, or agonistic liberalism.21 In borrowing from Sorel, Chantal Mouffe makes a useful distinction between politics of antagonism and politics of agonism. Sorel’s theories of violence and conflict may seem to be aligned with the first of these, but Mouffe aligns him with the latter.22 In a recent critique of this adaptation of Sorel, Antliff expresses scepticism regarding the strategy of applying such a cordon sanitaire around aspects of otherwise proto-fascistic ideologies – but by using Freeden and Connolly’s theories of ideological evolution and clustering, perhaps a case can be made for such selective reading, if not of Sorel then of admirers like Hulme and Orage.23 Indeed, Hulme’s politics of conflict can be re-read in light of his pluralism, remembering the perspectivism that underlay his conservative dogma and which, despite his pugilism, stood at odds with any crudely Nietzschean ‘will to power’. Even as he vigorously made his point, Hulme was revelling in the prospect of a fight with a worthy combatant. The debating society meeting was his earliest and favourite intellectual forum, and he never lost pleasure in arguing with friends. With this in mind, the value of the intellectual tussle to the liberal tradition may be recognized – rather than a conventionalizing orthodoxy, this

234

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

activity exploits the energies of conflict while never condemning or oppressing difference.

Coxyde Hulme’s epitaph in the cemetery record at Coxyde and in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s official record of casualties reads ‘Thomas Ernest Hulme […] One of the War Poets’. This, the first of several last words on Hulme’s status and taxonomy is substantiated by the single short poem delivered verbally to Pound, discussed above. The canon and nature of ‘war poetry’ has been the subject of much debate. Not long into the Great War, it was an established genre, owing much to the fame of Rupert Brooke, but its definition had yet to be firmly fixed, and indeed it has remained a quite loose category, taking in poets from George Trakl to Isaac Rosenberg. The C.W.G.C. register includes numerous uses of the phrase ‘One of the War Poets’, pointing to the understandably cursory classification of many literary men killed in action, from Edward Thomas to Raymond Asquith. It is, however, a suggestive alternative tag to those most commonly applied to Hulme, whether ‘Imagist’ or, more dubiously, ‘Vorticist’; ‘modernist’ or, most contentiously, ‘fascist’. It was only posthumously that he was so identified: if intellectual history truly wielded powers of ex post facto explanation, his epitaph would perhaps more accurately read ‘one of the modernists’ or ‘one of the fascists’. But the cemetery record stands uncorrected, and it is tempting to suggest that this rushed designation was appropriate. Given Hulme’s chronicle of battle between materialists and vitalists, nominalists and realists, and romantics and classicists, his role in the ‘revolt against positivism’ and, to borrow an apt phrase, the ‘war against cliché’, one might define him as a ‘War Poet’ in a profounder sense, the poet of discord, whose incongruous images were meant to clash as much as chime. The small, dry images of Hulme’s poetry may seem remote from the scale and horror of the trenches, but his poetic theory was part of a line of enquiry that led from Nietzsche and Gourmont, Ribot, Le Bon and Bergson, to Sorel’s Pascalian defence of violence, to the Proudhonian notion of equilibrium through conflict, and to his own defence of the Allied cause. Imagism was ‘war poetry’, of a kind. War was one of two metaphors that recur throughout Hulme’s work; the other was that of biological fission. As we have seen, the scientific debate regarding speciation generated metaphors for genealogical distinctions in other fields of human activity. As Fry put it, London modernism was

Conclusion

235

fissiparous, given, like protozoa, to endless secession and subdivision. For Hulme, the metaphor was used to convey the impulse to define one’s identity, to draw limits around one’s particular position. This also called to mind the construction of a national border, or a front line. The Western Front drew lines across Europe, making real the Nietzschean vision of man writing order on chaos. Hulme saw that these lines were arbitrary and must be fought for. This battle to define his position or ideology – his species – makes Hulme’s work, as Beasley put it, a ‘museum of modernism in the making’.24 Reading his work is like surveying a long-quiet battlefield from the air, trying to recreate the networks of trench lines that are now grassed over, the landscape of modernism so familiar it seems it was always thus.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

7 8

Ogden invited Hulme to speak in Cambridge in 1912, corresponded with him up to his death and arranged for the publication of Speculations in 1924 (see Ferguson, Short Sharp Life, pp. 107–13, 236–48, xiv). Auden’s line appears in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1937). This retrospective show, entitled ‘The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World’, and including works by Bomberg, Lewis, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, exhibited at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and Tate Britain, between September 2010 and 4 September 2011. See the 2011 exhibition catalogue, The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, ed. by Mark Antliff, Vivien Greene, and Robert Upstone (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), and subsequent essays collected in Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. by Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 1937; 1982, p. 256. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 2.7 (April 1924), 231–32. The metaphor is used by Michael Freeden in his discussion of ‘conceptual disaggregation’ and ideological family trees/resemblances in Ideologies and Political Theory. See ‘Introduction’ and Chapter 5. See Mark Bevir, (ed.), Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates Since 1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, particularly Marc Stears, ‘Guild Socialism’, pp. 40–59. See Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism. Connolly uses this metaphor The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1974; 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Griffin notes its similarity to Freeden’s idea in ‘Cloister or Cluster? The Implications of Emilio

236

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism

Gentile’s Ecumenical Theory of Political Religion for the Study of Extremism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6.1 (June 2005), 33–52. The Sorelian device of ‘diremption’ is useful here, as is its seeming counter-part in contemporary political theory, the method of ‘conceptual disaggregation’ developed by Freeden, there are concepts here that might be mapped onto forms of pluralism. Stears proposes as much in his studies of the New Age’s multi-vocal content, or Guild Socialism’s contribution to the Anglo-American tradition of Pluralism. 9 Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’. 10 Stefan Collini, ‘The European Modernist as Anglican Moralist: the later social criticism of T.S. Eliot’, in Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture, ed. Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 207–29. 11 Jonas Kurlberg, ‘Resisting Totalitarianism: The Moot and a New Christendom’, Religions Compass 7.12 (December 2013), 517–31. 12 References to Maritain outnumber those to Maurras in Eliot’s recently published correspondence of the 1920s. T. S. Eliot, Letters 1922–1925, eds. John Haffenden, Hugh Haughton and Valerie X. Eliot (London: Faber, 2009). 13 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Social Justice (Oxford: Blackwell 1990; 2006); and Phillip Blond, Red Tory (London: Faber, 2010). 14 For a survey, see Radical Orthodoxy: A Reader, ed. John Milbank and Simon Oliver (London: Routledge, 2009). 15 Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, chapter three. 16 Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (Basingtoke: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 1–24. 17 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 1–54. Gray, The Silence of Animals, pp. 131–38. 18 Connolly, Pluralism, pp. 68–96, 97–130. 19 Ibid., pp. 97–130. 20 Ibid., pp. 2–5. 21 The term is introduced by Gray in Isaiah Berlin and discussed at greater length in the chapter of that title in Enlightenment’s Wake (London: Routledge, 1995). There is a growing literature on ‘agonism’, which is sometimes associated with post-structuralist approaches, sometimes with some varieties of post-Marxism (notably Chantal Mouffe) and sometimes with realist or pluralist liberals (Hannah Arendt). Other significant figures on the more liberal end of the agonist spectrum are James Tully and Bonnie Honig. Thanks to Alex Thomson for providing a summary of the field. 22 Mouffe, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?’ 23 Mark Antliff, ‘Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel Among the European Left’, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2 (2011), 155–87. 24 Beasley, ‘A Definite Meaning’, p. 70.

Works Cited Primary Manuscripts Curle Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Epstein Papers, Henry Moore Institute Archive. Hulme Collection, University Library, Keele University. Hulme Collection, Hull History Centre. Hulme Papers, St John’s College Archive, Cambridge. Marsh Papers, New York Public Library. Ogden Papers, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario.

Journals The New Age The Commentator Cambridge Magazine

Printed works Beaunier, André, La Poésie nouvelle. Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1902. Bell, Clive, Art. London: Chatto and Windus, 1914. Belloc, Hilaire, The Servile State. London and Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1912 Belloc, Hilaire and Cecil Chesterton, The Party System. London: Stephen Swift, 1911. Berenson, Bernard, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance. New York and London: Putnam and Sons, 1896. Bergson, Henri, ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (March 1902), 225–43. Bergson, Henri, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme. London: Macmillan, 1913. Bergson, Henri, ‘L’Intuition Philosophique: Conférence faite au Congrès de Philosophie de Bologne le 10 avril 1911’, repr. in La Pensée et le mouvant. Essais et conferences. París: Félix Alcan, 1934, pp. 135–62. Bergson, Henri, ‘Philosophical Intuition: Lecture given at the Philosophical Congress at Bologna, April 10 1911’, in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946, pp. 126–52. Bergson, Henri, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889.

238

Works Cited

Bergson, Henri, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910; repr. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001. Bergson, Henri, Le Rire. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1900. Bergson, Henri, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan, 1911. Bergson, Henri, Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896. Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Bergson, Henri, L’Évolution créatrice. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1907. Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt, 1911. Bomberg, David, ‘Preface’, David Bomberg. Exh. Cat. London: Goupil Gallery, 1914. Bucke, Richard Maurice, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. New York: Dutton, 1901. Caballero, Giménez, ‘Conversación con un camisa negra, Ramiro de Maeztu’, La Gaceta Literaria, 4 (15 Feb 1927), 1. Čapek, Karel, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Play in three acts and an epilogue, trans. Paul Selver, adapted for the English stage by Nigel Playfair. London: Oxford University Press, 1923. Carpenter, Edward, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure and Other Essays. London: Swan Sonnenscheim, 1889. Carpenter, Edward, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India. London: Swan, Sonnenschein, 1892. Carpenter, Edward, ed., Forecasts of the Coming Century by a Decade of Writers. Manchester: Labour Press, 1897. Carpenter, Edward, Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902. Carpenter, Edward, The Art of Creation: Essays on the Self and Its Powers. London: G. Allen, 1904. Carpenter, Edward, Towards Democracy (1883–1905), London and Manchester: Sonnenschein and S. Clarke, 1905. Carpenter, Edward, The Drama of Life and Death: a Study of Human Evolution and Transfiguration. London: George Allen, 1912. Carpenter, Niles, Guild Socialism: An Historical and Critical Analysis. New York and London: Appleton, 1922. Carter, Marion Hamilton, ‘Romanes’ Idea of Mental Development’, American Journal of Psychology, 11 (1899), 101–18. Chesterton, G. K., Heretics. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1905. Chesterton, G. K., Orthodoxy. London: John Lane, 1908. Chesterton, G. K., ‘Orage: Memories’, New English Weekly, 6.5. [A.R. Orage Memorial Number] (15 Nov 1934); repr. as ‘Introduction’ to Philip Mairet, A.R. Orage: A Memoir. London: J. M. Dent, 1936, pp. v–viii. Cole, Margaret, ‘Guild Socialism and the Labour Research Department’, in Essays in Labour History 1886–1923, eds. Asa Briggs and John Saville. London: MacMillan, 1971.

Works Cited

239

Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection: or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1869. Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man. London: John Murray, 1871. Denis, Maurice, ‘Cézanne I–II’, trans. by Roger Fry in Burlington Magazine, 16.82 (Jan 1910), 207–19; 16.83 (Feb 1910), 275–80. Dukes, Ashley, The Scene is Changed. London: MacMillan, 1942. Eisenstein, Sergei, ‘The Cinematic Principle and The Ideogram’ (1929), in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. trans. and ed. Jay Leda. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949. Eliot, T. S., Letters 1922–1925, eds. John Haffenden, Hugh Haughton and Valerie Eliot. London: Faber, 2009. Epstein, Jacob, ‘Foreword’, in Speculations, ed. Herbert Read. London: Kegan Paul, 1924. pp. vii–viii. Flint, F. S., ‘The History of Imagism’, The Egoist, 5.2 (1 May 1915), 70–71. Flint, F. S., ‘Contemporary French Poetry’, Poetry Review Special Number 1.8 (August 1912), 352. Frazer, James, The Golden Bough. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890; 2nd edn, 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1900; 3rd edn, 12 vols. London: Macmillan, 1906–1915. Fry, Roger, ‘The Last Phase of Impressionism’, Burlington Magazine, 12.60 (March 1908), 374–76; repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 72–5. Fry, Roger, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, The Quarterly Review, 2 (April 1909), 171–90; repr. in Vision and Design, pp. 11–25. Fry, Roger, ‘The Post-Impressionists – II’, The Nation, 8 (3 Dec 1910), 402–03 (p. 402); repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 90–94. Fry, Roger, ‘The French Group’, in The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition. Exh. Cat. London: Grafton Gallery, 1912, n.p; repr. as ‘The French Post-Impressionists’ in Vision and Design, pp. 156–59. Fry, Roger, ‘Two Views of the London Group: Part One’, The Nation, 14 (14 March 1914), 998–99 (p. 998); repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 163–66. Fry, Roger, ‘Blake and British Art’, The Nation, 14 (7 Feb 1914), 791–92; repr. in A Roger Fry Reader, pp. 154–57. Fry, Roger, ‘Art and Life’, Vision and Design, 1920, pp. 1–10. Fry, Roger, Vision and Design. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920. Fry, Roger, A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Galton, Francis, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Law and Consequences. London: MacMillan, 1869. Galton, Francis, ‘Les images generiques’, La Revue Scientifique, 17 (1879), 221–25. Galton, Francis, ‘Combined Portraits, and the Combination of Sense Impressions Generally’, Proceedings of the Birmingham Philosophical Society, 2 (1879), 26–29. Galton, Francis, ‘Statistics of Mental Imagery’, Mind, 5 (1880), 301–18. Galton, Francis, Inquiries into Human Faculty at its Development. London: MacMillan, 1883. Gaultier, Jules de, ‘Essai de physiologie poétique’, in La Revue Blanche, 6.31 (May 1894), 402. Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme. Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1902. Ginner, Charles, ‘The Camden Town Group’, The Studio, 130.632 (Nov 1945), 129–36.

240

Works Cited

Gooch, G. P., The History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898. Gourmont, Remy de, Le Problème du style. Paris: Mercure de France, 1902. Gourmont, Remy de, Remy de Gourmont: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Glenn Burne. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. Guyau, Jean-Marie, Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1884. Guyau, Jean-Marie, L’Art au point de vue sociologique. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889. Hardie, Keir, My Confession of Faith in the Labour Alliance. London: I.L.P. Publications, 1909. Hobson, S. G. [Unsigned], National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out, ed. A. R. Orage. London: G. Bell, 1914. Hobson, S. G., Pilgrim to the Left: Memoirs of a Modern Revolutionist. London: Edward Arnold, 1938. Hobson, S. G., Functional Socialism. London: Stanley Nott, 1936. Hulme, T. E., Speculations, ed. Herbert Read. London: Kegan Paul, 1924. Hulme, T. E., Further Speculations, ed. Samuel Hynes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962. Hulme, T. E., Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Hulme, T. E., Selected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Patrick McGuinness. Manchester: Carcanet, 1998. Huxley, T. H., ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata and Its History’, Fortnightly Review, 22 (1874), 199–245; repr. in Collected Essays. London: Macmillan, 1893–4, II (1894). Huxley, T. H., Hume. London: Macmillan, 1878; repr. as Collected Essays. London: Macmillan, 1893–4, VI (1894), 3–240. Jackson, Holbrook, The Eighteen-Nineties. London: G. Richards, 1913. James, William, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt, 1890; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. James, William, The Will to Believe. London: Longmans, Green, 1897. James, William, ‘Giovanni Papini and the Pragmatist Movement in Italy’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method, 3.13 (1906), 337–41. James, William, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. London: Longmans, Green, 1907. James, William, A Pluralistic Universe. London: Longmans, Green, 1909. James, William, Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1902 [1985]. Kahn, Gustave, Premiers poèmes. Paris: Mercure de France, 1897. Kennedy, J. M., The Quintessence of Nietzsche. London: T.W. Laurie, 1909. Kennedy, J. M., Tory Democracy. London: Stephen Swift, 1911. Kennedy, J. M., English Literature, 1880–1905. London: Stephen Swift, 1912. Kenney, Rowland, Westering: An Autobiography of Rowland Kenney. J.M. Dent and Sons, London, 1939. Lasserre, Pierre, ‘La Philosophie de M. Bergson’, L’Action Française Mensuelle, 246 (15 March 1911), 165–83. Lasserre, Pierre, La Morale du Nietzsche. Paris: Mercure de France, 1902.

Works Cited

241

Lasserre, Pierre, Le Romantisme français: Essai sur la Révolution dans les sentiments et dans les idées au XIXe siècle. Paris: Mercure de France, 1907. Le Bon, Gustave, La psychologie des foules. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1895. Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd, trans. unknown. London: T.F. Unwin, 1903. Lee, Vernon and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: John Lane, 1912. Le Roy, Edouard, Une philosophie nouvelle: Henri Bergson. Paris: Alcan, 1912. Levy, Oscar, ed., The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: the First Complete and Authorised English translation, 18 vols. London and Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1909–1913. Lewis, Wyndham, ‘Long Live the Vortex!’ Blast, 1 (20 June 1914), 7; repr. in Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913–1956, eds. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, pp. 25–27. Lewis, Wyndham, ‘Frederic Spencer Gore’, Blast, 1 (20 June 1914), 150; repr. in Wyndham Lewis on Art, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, pp. 54–55. Lewis, Wyndham, ‘The London Group’, Blast, 2 (July 1915), 77–79; repr. in Wyndham Lewis on Art, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, pp. 85–90. Lewis, Wyndham, Blasting and Bombardiering. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937. Lewis, Wyndham, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose. London: Methuen, 1963. Lewis, Wyndham, Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913–1956, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox London: Thames and Hudson, 1969. Lloyd Morgan, C., Animal Life and Intelligence. London: Edward Arnold, 1891. Ludovici, Anthony M., ‘Obituary Letters to the Editor: Mr. Anthony M. Ludovici’, New English Weekly, 6.5 (15 Nov 1934), 115. Ludovici, Anthony M., Who is to be Master of the World? London and Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1909. Ludovici, Anthony M., Nietzsche and Art. London: Constable, 1911. MacAlister, Donald and Galton, Francis, ‘The Law of the Geometric Mean’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, 29 (1879), 367–76. Maeztu, Ramiro de, Authority, Liberty and Function in the Light of the War: A Critique of Authority and Liberty as the Foundations of the Modern State and an Attempt to Base Societies on the Principle of Function. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1916. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1939. Maurras, Charles, ‘Idées françaises ou idées suisses’, L’Action française, I (1899), 307–27. Maurras, Charles, ‘Préface de L’Édition définitive’, Romantisme et Révolution. Paris: Nouvelle Librarie Nationale, 1922, pp. 1–24. Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859. Mill, John Stuart, Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. London: Longman, Green, 1865. Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903. Muir, Edwin, An Autobiography. London: The Hogarth Press, 1940. Nevinson, Christopher, Paint and Prejudice. London: Methuen, 1937. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1873), trans. Shaun Whiteside and ed. Michael Tanner. London: Harmondsworth Penguin, 1993.

242

Works Cited

Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’ (1873) in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979, pp. 79–91. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Human, All Too Human (1878–80), trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann. London: Penguin, 1994; repr. rev. edn, 2004. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–5), trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil (1885), trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968; repr. rev. edn, 1990. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Twilight of the Idols or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and The Antichrist (1888) trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968; repr. rev. edn, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. and ed. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nietzsche’s Werke [Gesammtausgabe Koegel], ed. Fritz Koegel. Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1895–1897. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nietzsche’s Werke [Grossoktavausgabe], ed. Heinrich Köselitz. Leipzig: Kröner, 1903–1919. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: the First Complete and Authorised English Translation, ed. Oscar Levy, 18 vols. London/Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909–13. Ogden, C. K. [Unsigned], ‘Original Sin—And Mr. T. E. Hulme’, Cambridge Magazine, 1 (9 March 1912), 201. Orage, A. R., ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 8 (4 Jan 1896), 2. Orage, A. R., ‘Towards Democracy’, Labour Leader, 8 (4 Jan 1896), 2. Orage, A. R., ‘Towards Democracy’, Labour Leader, 8 (4 Jan 1896), 2. Orage, A. R., ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 8 (2 May 1896), 156. Orage, A. R., ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 8 (11 April 1896), 122. Orage, A. R., ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 7 (16 Nov 1895), 5. Orage, A. R., ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 9 (13 Feb 1897), 50. Orage, A. R., ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 8 (22 Feb 1896), 64. Orage, A. R., ‘Past and Present’, Labour Leader, 9 (15 May 1897), 162. Orage, A. R., ‘After Ten Years: The Antiquity of Man’, Theosophical Review, 39 (Nov 1906), 145–52. Orage, A. R., ‘Occults Art and Occults Faculty’, Theosophical Review 39 (Jan 1907), 451–55. Orage, A. R., ‘In Defence of Agnosticism’, Theosophical Review, 39 (Feb 1907), 510–17. Orage, A. R., ‘The New Romanticism’, Theosophical Review, 40 (March 1907), 50–56. Orage, A. R., ‘Politics for Craftsmen’, Contemporary Review, 91 (June 1907), 787–88. Orage, A. R., Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age. London: T.N. Foulis, 1906. Orage, A. R., Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism. London: T.N. Foulis, 1907. Orage, A. R., Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superman. London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1907. Orage, A. R., ‘The New Romanticism’, Theosophical Review, 40 (March 1907), 50–56.

Works Cited

243

Orage, A. R., ‘Notes of the Week’, New English Weekly, 3.22 (14 Sep 1933), 505–08; repr. in Political and Economic Writings, ed. Montgomery Butchart. London: Stanley Nott, 1936, p. 221. Orage, A. R., Political and Economic Writings, ed. Montgomery Butchart. London: Stanley Nott, 1936. Orage, A. R., Orage as Critic, ed. Wallace Martin. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Papini, Giovanni, ‘Dall’uomo a dio’, Leonardo, 4.1 (Feb 1906), 6–15. Papini, Giovanni, Il Crepuscolo dei filosofi: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Comte, Spencer, Nietzsche, Societa Editrice Lombarda: Milano, 1906. Papini, Giovanni, ‘Pragmatismo messo in ordine’, Leonardo, 3.2 (April 1905), 45–48. Papini, Giovanni, Sul pragmatismo (saggi e ricerche). Milan: Libreria Editrice Milanese, 1913. Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter. London: J.M. Dent, 1908. Penty, Arthur, The Restoration of the Gild System. London: Swan, Sonnenschein and Co., 1906. Penty, Arthur, ‘The Restoration of Beauty to Life’, New Age, 1.1 (2 May 1907), 5. Poincaré, Henri, Science and Hypotheses (1902), trans by W. J. Greenstreet, 1905; repr. New York: Dover, 1952. Pound, Ezra, ‘Prolegomena’, Poetry Review I (1912), 72–76. Pound, Ezra, ‘Psychology and Troubadours’, The Quest, 4.1 (Oct 1912), 37–53. Pound, Ezra, ‘Status Rerum’, Poetry, 1.4 (Jan 1913), 123–27. Pound, Ezra, ‘The New Sculpture’, The Egoist, 1.4 (16 Feb 1914), 68. Pound, Ezra, ‘Suffragettes’, The Egoist, 1 (1 July 1914), 254–55. Pound, Ezra, ‘Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist’, The Egoist, 1.6 (15 Aug 1914), 306–07. Pound, Ezra, ‘A Study in French Poets’, Little Review, 4.10 (Feb 1918), 55. Pound, Ezra, ‘He Pulled His Weight’, New English Weekly, 6.5 [A.R. Orage Memorial Number] (15 Nov 1934), 109. Pound, Ezra, ‘Obituary: A.R. Orage: In the Wounds’, The Criterion, 14.56 (April 1935), 440. Pound, Ezra, Ripostes. London: Stephen Swift, 1912. Pound, Ezra, Literary Essays. London: Faber, 1952. Pound, Ezra, Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1973. Prezzolini, Giuseppe, ‘L’Uomo-Dio’, Leonardo, 1 (March 1903), 3–4. Prezzolini, Giuseppe, L’Arte di persuadere. Firenze: F. Lumachi, 1907. Prezzolini, Giuseppe, La Teoria sindicalista. Naples: Francesco Ferella Editore, 1909. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, De la Justice dans la révolution et dans l’Eglise. Paris: Librairie de Garnier Frères, 1858. Read, Herbert, ‘Introduction’, in T. E. Hulme, Speculations. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924, pp. ix–xv. Read, Herbert, ‘Introductory Note’ to ‘Notes on Language and Style’, The Criterion, 3.13 (July 1925), 485–97. Reckitt, Maurice, As It Happened: An Autobiography. London: J.M. Dent, 1941. Ribot, Théodule, L’Évolution des idées générales. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1897. Ribot, Théodule, The Evolution of General Ideas, trans. F. A. Welby. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company; 1899. Ribot, Théodule, Essai sur l’imagination créatrice. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1900.

244

Works Cited

Ribot, Théodule, Essay on the Creative Imagination, trans. A. H. N. Baron. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1906. Romanes, George John, Mental Evolution in Animals, with a Posthumous Essay on Instinct by Charles Darwin. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883. Romanes, George John, Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1888. Ruskin, John, Works, eds. E. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903–12, V: Modern Painters III (1904). Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy. London: Home University, 1912. Rutter, Frank, Revolution in Art. London: Art News Press, 1910. Schiller, F. C. S., ‘Another Congress of Philosophers’, The Pelican Record, 10 (June 1911), 183–85. Selver, Paul, Orage and the ‘New Age’ Circle. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1959. Shaw, George Bernard, ‘The Illusions of Socialism’, in Forecasts of the Coming Century by a Decade of Writers, ed. Edward Carpenter. Manchester: Labour Press, 1897, pp. 141–73. Sickert, Walter, Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, ed. Anna Gruetzner Robins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 59–61. Sorel, Georges, ‘L’Évolution créatrice’, Le Mouvement socialiste, 22 (15 Oct 1907), 257–82; 22 (15 Dec 1907), 478–91; 23 (15 Jan 1908), 34–52; 23 (15 March 1908), 184–94; 23 (15 April 1908), 276–94. Sorel, Georges, Le Procès de Socrate. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889. Sorel, Georges, Les Illusions du progrès. Paris, M. Rivière, 1908. Sorel, Georges, Reflexions sur la violence. Paris: M. Riviere, 1908. Sorel, Georges, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sorel, Georges, The Illusions of Progress, trans. John and Charlotte Stanley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature. London: Heinemann, 1899. Taine, Hippolyte, De l’Intelligence, 2 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1870. Taine, Hippolyte, On Intelligence, trans. by T. D. Haye. London: L. Reeve, 1871. Taine, Hippolyte, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, 6 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1876. Taine, Hippolyte, The Origins of Contemporary France, trans. John Durand, 6 vols. London: Daldy, Isbister, 1878–1885. Vaihinger, Hans, Die Philosophie des Als Ob: System der Theoretischen, Praktischen und Religiosen Fiktionen der Menschheit. Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1911. Visan, Tancrède de, L’Attitude du lyrisme contemporaine. Paris: Mercure de France, 1911. Vivekananda, Swami, ‘Karma Yoga’ (1895–6), in Addresses on the Vedanta Religion (1896); repr. in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 5 vols. Almora, Himalayas: Advaita Ashram, 1915–1918. Wallas, Graham, Human Nature in Politics. London: Constable, 1908. Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraction and Empathy (1907), trans. by Michael Bullock. 1953; Chicago: Elephant Books, 1997.

Works Cited

245

Secondary Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Adamson, Walter, ‘Modernism and Fascism: The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1903–1922’, American Historical Review, 95.2 (April 1990), 359–90. Adamson, Walter, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993. Albright, Daniel, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Anderson, Elizabeth, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Antliff, Allan, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) Antliff, Mark, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Antliff, Mark, ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’, in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 184–208. Antliff, Mark, ‘Fascism, Modernism and Modernity’, Art Bulletin, 84.1 (March 2002), 148–69. Antliff, Mark, ‘Georges Sorel and the Anti-Enlightenment: Art, Politics, Ideology’, in Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870–1914: A Symposium, eds. June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 307–32. Antliff, Mark, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilisation of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Antliff, Mark, ‘Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel Among the European Left’, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 2 (2011), 155–87. Antliff, Mark and Greene, Vivien, eds, The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World. London: Tate Publishing, 2011. Antliff, Mark and Klein, Scott W., eds, Vorticism: New Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Antliff, Mark and Leighten, Patricia, Cubism and Culture. London and New York: Thames and Hudson Press, 2001. Ardis, Anne, ‘Debating Feminism, Modernism, and Socialism: Beatrice Hasting’s Voices in The New Age’, in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Ardis, Anne, ‘The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age’, Modernism/ Modernity, 14.3 (Sep 2007), 407–34. Ardis, Anne, ‘Modernism and Democracy: A. R. Orage and The New Age (1908–1922)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, eds. Andrew Thacker and Peter Brooker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 205–25. Ardis, Anne, Modernism and Cultural Conflict 1880–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Asher, Kenneth, T.S. Eliot and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

246

Works Cited

Ashton, Rosemary, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Avery, Todd, ‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and Two Trajectories of Ethical AntiHumanism’, T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, eds. Andrzej Gasiorek and Edward Comentale. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 169–86. Baine Haines, R., ed., Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, Part One, Albany: State University of New York, 2001. Balakian, Anna, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal. New York: Random House, 1967. Baron, Wendy, The Camden Town Group. London: Scolar Press,. Baron, Wendy, Perfect Moderns: A History of the Camden Town Group. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Baron, Wendy, Walter Sickert: Paintings and Drawings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Barron, Stephanie, ed., ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991. Beasley, Rebecca, ‘ “A Definite Meaning”: T.E. Hulme’s Art Criticism’, in T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, ed. Andrzej Gasiorek and Edward P. Comentale. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 57–72. Beasley, Rebecca, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenthcentury Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Bell, Ian F. A., Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound. London: Methuen, 1981. Bell, Quentin and Stephen Chaplin, ‘The Ideal Home Rumpus’, Apollo, 80 (Oct 1964), 284–91. Bentley, Michael and Andrew Jones, ‘Salisbury and Baldwin’ in Conservative Essays, ed. Maurice Cowling. London: Cassell, 1978, pp. 25–40. Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy. London: John Murray, 1990, pp. 94–174. Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Berlin, Isaiah, The Crooked Timber of Humanity. 1990. London: Pimlico, 2013. Bevir, Mark, ‘British Socialism and American Romanticism’, English Historical Review, 110 (Sep 1995), 878–901. Bevir, Mark, ‘Ernest Belfort Bax: Marxist, Positivist, and Idealist’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), 119–35. Bevir, Mark, The Making of British Socialism. Princeton, New Jersey; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Bevir, Mark, ed., Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates Since 1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Binckes, Faith, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Blaazer, David, ‘Guild Socialism and the Historians’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 44.1 (March 1998), 1–15.

Works Cited

247

Black, Jonathan, ed., Blasting the Future: Vorticism in Britain 1910–1920. London: Philip Wilson, 2004. Blond, Phillip, Red Tory. London: Faber, 2010. Blumberg, H. E., Britain’s Sea Soldiers: A Record of the Royal Marines during the War, 1914– 1919. Devonport: Swiss, 1927. Boakes, Robert, From Darwin to Behaviourism: Psychology and the Minds of Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Booth, Howard and Nigel Rigby, eds, Modernism and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Bordeaux, Henry, Charles Maurras et L’Action française. Paris: Plon, 1955. Bouquet, Mary, ‘Family Trees and their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of London, n.s. 2 (March 1996), 43–66. Bowler, Peter J., The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Bradshaw, David, ‘Introduction’ to A Concise Companion to Modernism, ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003, pp. 34–55. Brehier, Emile, ‘Images plotiniennes, images bergsoniennes’, in Les Etudes bergsoniennes, 11 vols (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947–1974), II (1949), 107–28. Brooker, Peter, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, eds, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol.1 Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Broome, J. H., Pascal. London: Edward Arnold, 1965. Brown, Callum, Post-Modernism in History. Harlow: Pearson and Longman, 2005. Bullen, J. B., ‘Introduction’ to Clive Bell, in Art, Oxford: Worlds Classics, 1987, pp. xxi–l. Bullen, J. B., ‘Introduction’ to Roger Fry, in Vision and Design, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, pp xi–xxv. Bullen, J. B., ‘Introduction’, in Post-Impressionism in England: The Critical Reception, ed. J.B. Bullen. London and New York: Routledge, 1988, pp. 1–38. Bullen, J. B., ed., Post-Impressionism In England: The Critical Reception. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Bulmer, Michael, Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Burbridge, David, ‘Galton’s 100: an Exploration of Francis Galton’s Imagery Studies’, British Journal of the History of Science, 27 (1994), 443–63. Burrow, John, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Burrow, John, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. London: Penguin, 2008. Burwick, Frederick and Douglass, Paul, eds, The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Bush, Ronald, ‘Modernist Poetry and Poetics’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, eds. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 232–50.

248

Works Cited

Bush, Ronald, ‘Modernism and Gender Politics’, unpublished paper, delivered to the London Modernism Seminar (6 Nov 2004). Carey, John, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Carpenter, Niles, Guild Socialism: An Historical And Critical Analysis. London: D. Appleton, 1922. Carr, Helen, ‘Imagism and Empire’, Modernism and Empire, eds. Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 64–92. Carr, Helen, ‘T.E. Hulme and The Spiritual Dread of Space’, in T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, eds. Andrzej Gasiorek and Edward P. Comentale. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 93–102. Carr, Helen, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and The Imagists. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. Carroll, John, Break Out from the Crystal Palace. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Carswell, John, Lives and Letters: A.R. Orage, Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, S.S.Koteliansky, 1906–1957. London: Faber and Faber 1978. Chace, William, The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973. Chadwick, Charles, Symbolism. London: Methuen, 1971. Churchill, Suzanne, The Little Magazine ‘Others’ and the Renovation of American Poetry. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Churchill, Suzanne and Adam McKible, eds, Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Clark, David, Victor Grayson: Labour’s Lost Leader. London: Quartet, 1985. Clarke, Bruce, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Clearfield, Andrew M., These Fragments I Have Shored: Collage and Montage in Early Modernist Poetry. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984. Coates, John, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis. Hull: Hull University Press, 1985. Collini, Stefan, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Collini, Stefan, ‘The European Modernist as Anglican Moralist: the later social criticism of T.S. Eliot’, Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture, eds. Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. pp. 207–29. Collins, Judith, The Omega Workshops. London: Secker and Warburg, 1984. Commentale, Edward P. and Gasiorek, Andrzej, ‘On the Significance of a Hulmean Modernism’, in T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernis, eds. Edward Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 1–22. Connolly, William, The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd edn. Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1974. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Connolly, William, Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Corbett, David Peters, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Works Cited

249

Corbett, David Peters, ‘“Gross Material Facts”: Sexuality, Identity and the City in Walter Sickert, 1905–1910,’ Art History, 21 (1998), 45–64. Corbett, David Peters, Walter Sickert. London: Tate Publishing, 2001. Corbett, David Peters, with Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell, eds, Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–1940. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Corbett, David Peters, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004. Cork, Richard, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, 2 vols. Berkeley and Los. Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Cork, Richard, David Bomberg. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987. Cork, Richard, ‘Jacob Epstein and the Significance of the Rock Drill’ (Lecture delivered at the Royal Academy, 13 Nov 2009. Accessed at: http://static.royalacademy.org.uk/files/ rockdrill-613.mp3, 10 Aug 2011. Cornell, Kenneth, The Symbolist Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. Cornell, Kenneth, The Post-Symbolist Period: French Poetic Currents, 1900–1920. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Corrin, Jay, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. Corrin, Jay, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Cottington, David, Cubism in the Shadow of the War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in France 1905–1914. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Cottington, David, Cubism and Its Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Cowling, Elizabeth and Mundy, Jennifer, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico, and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 [exh.cat. Tate Gallery]. London: Tate Gallery, 1990. Cowling, Maurice, ed., Conservative Essays. London: Cassell, 1978. Coyle, Michael, ‘A Profounder Didacticism: Ruskin, Orage and Pound’s Perception of Social Credit’, Paideuma, 17.1 (1988), 7–28. Csengeri, Karen, ‘T.E. Hulme’s Borrowings from the French’, Comparative Literature, 34 (Winter 1982), 16–27. Csengeri, Karen, ‘The Intellectual Development of T. E. Hulme’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 32.1 (1989), 7–25. Csengeri, Karen, ‘Introduction’, in Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. xvi-xxiv. Csengeri, Karen, ed., Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Curtis, Michael, Three Against the Republic: Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959. Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1935. Dasenbrock, Reed Way, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Datta, Venita, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Davie, Donald, Purity of Diction in English Verse. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952. Davie, Donald, Ezra Pound. London: Fontana-Collins, 1975.

250

Works Cited

Delap, Lucy, ‘The Freewoman, Periodical Communities, and the Feminist Reading Public’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 61.2 (2000), 233–76. Delap, Lucy, ‘Feminist and Anti-Feminist Encounters in Edwardian Britain’, Historical Research, 78.201 (Aug 2005), 388, 393–98. DeLeonibus, Gaetano, ‘The Quarrel over Classicism: A Quest for Uniqueness’, in Nationalism and French Visual Culture 1870–1914, eds. June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 293–306. Den Otter, Sandra M., British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Diepeveen, Leonard, The Difficulties of Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2003. Douglas, Allen, From Fascism to Libertarian Communism: Georges Valois against the Third Republic. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1992. Eagleton, Terry, Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Eagleton, Terry, Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. Eastwood, Dorothy, The Revival of Pascal: A Study of His Relation to Modern French Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Edwards, Paul, Wyndham Lewis, Painter and Writer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Edwards, Paul, ‘ “You Must Speak with Two Tongues”: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Aesthetics and Literature’, in Blast: Vorticism 1914–1918, ed. Paul Edwards. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, pp. 113–20. Edwards, Paul, ‘The Imagery of T.E. Hulme’s Notebooks’, T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 23–38. Eleftherios Ikonomou and Harry Francis Mallgrave, eds, Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994. Eliot, T. S., ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion, 2.7 (April 1924), 231–32. Ellenberger, Henri, The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books, 1970. Epstein, Jacob, Let There Be Sculpture. London: Michael Joseph, 1940. Epstein, Jacob, Jacob Epstein: An Autobiography. London: Hulton Press, 1955. Epstein, Jacob, The Sculptor Speaks: Jacob Epstein to Arnold L. Haskell: A Series of Conversations on Art. London: Heinemann, 1931. Ferguson, Robert, The Short Sharp Life of T.E. Hulme. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Fernihough, Anne, ‘Go in Fear of Abstractions: Modernism and the Spectre of Democracy’, Textual Practice, 14.3 (2000), 479–97. Ferrall, Charles, Modernist Literature and Reactionary Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ferrall, Charles, ‘The New Age and the Emergence of Reactionary Modernism before the Great War’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38 (1992), 653–70. Forth, Christopher, Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891–1918. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969; New York: Pantheon, 1972. Freeden, Michael, ‘Political Concepts and Ideological Morphology’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 2.2 (1994), 140–64.

Works Cited

251

Freeden, Michael, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Freeden, Michael, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Freeden, Michael, The New Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Gallie, W. B., ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1956), 167–98. Garner, Les, A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden, 1882–1960. Aldershot: Avebury, 1990. Garver, Lee, ‘Lost Politics: The New Age and the Edwardian Socialist roots of British Modernism’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Chicago, 2001. Garver, Lee, ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’, in T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, eds. Edward Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 133–47. Gasiorek, Andrzej, ‘Towards a “Right Theory” of Society’, in T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, eds. Edward Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp 149–68. Gentile, Emile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Gibbons, Tom, ‘Modernism and Reactionary Politics’, Journal of Modern Literature, 3.5 (1973), 1140–157. Gibbons, Tom, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas, 1880–1920. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973. Ginzburg, Carlo, ‘Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 537–56. Glass, S. T., The Responsible Society: The Ideas of Guild Socialism. London: Longmans, 1966. Goldie, David, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Golding, Alan, ‘The Dial, The Little Review, and the Dialogics of Modernism’, American Periodicals, 15.1 (2005) 42–55; repr. in Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, eds. Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 65–81. Gray, John, Isaiah Berlin. London: Harper Collins, 1995. Gray, John, Enlightenment’s Wake. London: Routledge, 1995. Gray, John, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. London: Penguin, 2014. Green, Christopher, Art in France, 1900–1940. Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art, New Haven and London, 2000. Green, Christopher, ed., Art Made Modern: Roger Fry’s Vision of Art (Exh. Cat). London: Courtauld Gallery, 1999. Gregor, A. James, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Gregor, A. James, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Grenon, Russell, ‘Tancrède de Visan, An Intellectual Biography’, unpublished doctoral thesis. Columbia University, 1957.

252

Works Cited

Griffin, Roger, ‘Cloister or Cluster? The Implications of Emilio Gentile’s Ecumenical Theory of Political Religion for the Study of Extremism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6.1 (June 2005), 33–52. Griffin, Roger, ‘Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism: a “Mazeway Resynthesis”, Modernism/ Modernity, 15.1 (2008), 9–24. Griffin, Roger, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Griffith, Gareth, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw. London: Routledge, 1993. Grogin, R. C., The Bergsonian Controversy in France. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988. Gullace, Giovanni, ‘The Pragmatist Movement in Italy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 23.1 (Jan–March 1962), 91–105. Hallberg, Robert van, ‘Libertarian Imagism’, Modernism/Modernity 2.2 (1995), 63–79. Hancock, Curtis L., ‘The Influence of Plotinus on Bergson’s Critique of Empirical Science’, in Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, Part One, ed. by R. Baine Haines. Albany: State University of New York, 2001, pp. 139–61. Harding, Jason, The ‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Hargrove, June and Neil McWilliam, eds, Nationalism and French Visual Culture 1870–1914. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Harmer, J. B., Victory in Limbo: Imagism, 1908–1917. London: Secker and Warburg, 1975. Harrison, Charles, with Paul Wood, eds, Art In Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. Herbert, James D., Fauve Painting: The Making of the Cultural Politics. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Hobson, Suzanne, ‘ “The Angel Club”: Allen Upward and the Divine Calling of Modernist Literature’, Literature and Theology, 22.1 (2008), 48–63. Hobson, Suzanne, ‘Christian Prehistories of Literary Modernism in G.K. Chesterton and Allen Upward’, in Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, ed. by Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman. Leiden: Brill 2014, pp. 67–79. Hobson, Suzanne, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Holt, Ysanne, ‘An Ideal Modernity: Spencer Gore at Letchworth’, in Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–1940, ed. David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 91–113. Holton, Bob, British Syndicalism 1910–1914: Myths and Realities. London: Pluto, 1976. Home, J. R., ‘R. M. Bucke: Pioneer Psychiatrist, Practical Mystic’, Ontario History, 59 (1967), 197–208. Hough, Graham, Image and Experience: Reflections on a Literary Revolution. London: Duckworth, 1960. Hughes, H. Stuart, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959. Humphrey, Richard, Georges Sorel, Prophet Without Honor: A Study in Anti-Intellectualism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1951.

Works Cited

253

Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986. Hynes, Samuel, ‘Introduction’, Further Speculations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962, pp. vii–xxxi. Jackson, Paul, Great War Modernisms and ‘The New Age’ Magazine (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Jennings, Jeremy, Georges Sorel: The Character and Development of his Thought. London: Macmillan, 1985. Jodock, Darrell, Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and AntiModernism in Historical Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Johnson, Josephine, Florence Farr: Bernard Shaw’s New Woman. London: Colin Smythe, 1975. Jones, Alun R., The Life and Opinions of T.E. Hulme. London: Gollancz, 1960. Kadlec, David, ‘Pound, BLAST, and Syndicalism’, ELH: English Literary History, 60.4 (1993), 1015–031. Kadlec, David, Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Kayman, Martin, The Modernism of Ezra Pound: the Science of Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1986. Kennedy, Ellen, ‘Bergson’s Philosophy and French Political Doctrines: Sorel, Maurras, Péguy and de Gaulle’, Government and Opposition, 15 (1980), 75–91. Kenney, Rowland, Westering. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1939. Kermode, Frank, Romantic Image. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957. Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Kiernan, Edward J., Arthur J. Penty: His Contribution to Social Thought, unpublished doctoral thesis. Washington, D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 1941. Kojecky, Roger, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. London: Faber and Faber, 1971. Kubler, George A., A New History of Stereotyping. New York: Little and Ives, 1941. Kuenzli, Katherine, ‘Aesthetics and Cultural Politics in the Age of Dreyfus: Maurice Denis’s Homage to Cézanne’, Art History, 30.5 (Nov 2007), 683–711. Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Kurlberg, Jonas, ‘Resisting Totalitarianism: The Moot and a New Christendom’, Religions Compass 7 /12 (Dec 2013), 517–31. Lehmann, A. G., The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885–1895. Oxford: Blackwell, 1950. Leighten, Patricia, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989. Levenson, Michael, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Lewis, Pericles, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Liebregts, Peter, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Longenbach, James, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

254

Works Cited

Lovejoy, Arthur, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936. Lukes, Stephen, Individualism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973. Lyttleton, Adrian, ‘Introduction’, in Italian Fascisms from Pareto to Gentile, ed. Adrian Lyttleton, trans. Douglas Parmée. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. McCarthy, Fiona, Eric Gill. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Mairet, Philip, A. R. Orage: A Memoir. London: J. M. Dent, 1936. Marcus, Laura and Nicholls, Peter, eds, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Martin, Wallace, ‘Sources for the Imagist Aesthetic’, PMLA, 85.2 (March 1970), 196–204. Martin, Wallace, The ‘New Age’ Under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967. Martin, Wallace, ‘Introduction’, Orage as Critic. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. pp. 1–27. Matthew, H. C. G., ‘Haldane, Richard Burdon, Viscount Haldane (1856–1928)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011, accessed 28 May 2011. Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982. Mazgaj, Paul, Action Française and Revolutionary Syndicalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. McClelland, J. S., ed., The French Right (From de Maistre to Maurras). London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. McConkey, Kenneth, Impressionism in Britain, with an essay by Anna Gruetzner Robins, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. McLennan, David, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. London: Macmillan, 1974. McWilliam, Neil, ‘Action française, Classicism, and the Dilemmas of Traditionalism in France, 1900–1914’, in Nationalism and French Visual Culture 1870–1914, eds. June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 269–91. Mead, Henry, ‘T.E. Hulme, Bergson, and the New Philosophy’, European Journal of English Studies, 12.3 (Dec 2008), 245–60. Mead, Henry, ‘Modernist Anti-Modernists’, in Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, eds. Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman and David Addyman. Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 80–96. Meisel, James, The Genesis of Georges Sorel. Ann Arbor: George Wahr, 1951. Mendilow, Jonathan, The Romantic Tradition in British Socialism. London and Sydney: Croom and Helm, 1986. Michel, Walter, Wyndham Lewis, Paintings and Drawings. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971. Middleton, Christopher, ‘Documents on Imagism from the Papers of F.S. Flint’, The Review, 15 (April 1965), 31–51. Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Social Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990; 2006). Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine, and Ward, Graham, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. London: Routledge, 1999.

Works Cited

255

Milbank, John and Oliver, Simon, eds, Radical Orthodoxy: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2009. Milburn, Diane, The ‘Deutschlandbild’ of A. R. Orage and the ‘New Age’ Circle. Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1996. Morowitz, Laura, ‘Medievalism, Classicism, and Nationalism: The Appropriation of the French Primitifs in Turn-of-the-Century France’, in Nationalism and French Visual Culture 1870– 1914, eds. June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 225–42. Morrisson, Mark, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Mossé-Bastide, Rose Marie, Bergson et Plotin. Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 1959. Mouffe, Chantal, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?’, Social Research, 66.3 (Fall 1999), 745–58. Munton, Alan, ‘Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis’, in T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, eds. Andrzej Gasiorek and Edward P. Comentale. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 73–92. Munton, Alan, with Durman, Michael, ‘Wyndham Lewis and the Nature of Vorticism’, in Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura/Pittura, ed. G. Cianci. Palermo: Sellerio, 1982, pp. 111–18. Nicolson, Benedict, ‘Post-Impressionism and Roger Fry’, Burlington Magazine, 93 (Jan 1951), 10–15. North, Michael, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Nozick, Martin, ‘An Examination of Ramiro de Maeztu’, PMLA, 69 (Sept. 1954), 719–40. Nye, Robert, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic. London: Sage, 1975. Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics. London: Methuen, 1962. Oddie, William, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Osgood, Samuel, French Royalism under the Third and Fourth Republics. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960. Otis, Laura, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Owen, Alex, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pierrot, Jean, Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Pierson, Stanley, ‘Ernest Belfort Bax: 1854–1926: The Encounter of Marxism and Late Victorian Culture’, Journal of British Studies, 12.11 (1972), 39–60. Pierson, Stanley, British Socialists: The Journey from Fantasy to Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Pierson, Stanley, Marxism and British Socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. Piller, Christian, ‘The Neo-Realism in Ethics’, The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 277–88.

256

Works Cited

Pitt, Alan, ‘The Irrationalist Liberalism of Hippolyte Taine’, Historical Journal, 41.4 (1998), 1011–034. Pondrom, Cyrena N., ed., The Road from Paris: French Influence on English Poetry, 1900–1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge, 1945. Potter, Rachel, Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Rae, Patricia, ‘T.E. Hulme’s French Sources: A Reconsideration’, Comparative Literature, 41 (1989), 68–99. Rae, Patricia, ‘Imagisme and Bovarysme’, Southern Review, 21 (1988), 26–42. Rae, Patricia, ‘From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game: Representations of Truth in Vorticist Art’, ELH: A Journal of English Literary History, 56.3 (Fall 1989), 689–720. Rae, Patricia, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Redman, Tim, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Reed, Christopher, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Introductory Essays’, in The Roger Fry Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 1–6, 7–11, 48–60, 117–32. Rémond, René, The Right Wing in France from 1815 to De Gaulle, trans. James M. Laux. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Roberts, Michael, T.E. Hulme. London: Faber, 1938. Robins, Anna Gruetzner, ‘The London Impressionists at the Goupil Gallery’, in Kenneth McConkey, Impressionism in Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 87–97. Robins, Anna Gruetzner, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Sickert: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Anna Gruetzner Robins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. xxvii–xxxvi. Robins, Anna Gruetzner, Modern Art in Britain 1910–1914. London: Merrell Holberton in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1997. Robins, Anna Gruetzner, ed., Walter Sickert: Complete Writings on Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Robinson, Alan, Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885–1914. London: Macmillan, 1985. Rothenstein, John, Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore. London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976, pp. 26–27. Rowbotham, Sheila, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love. London: Verso, 2008. Rubin, Adrianne, ‘This Difficult and Uncertain Science: Roger Fry’s Interpretation of Aesthetic Perception’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Oxford University, 2006. Ryan, Judith, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991. Schapiro, J. Selwyn, ‘Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Harbinger of Fascism’, American Historical Review, 50.4 (July 1945), 714–37. Schneidau, Herbert, ‘Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound’, Modern Philology, 65.3 (Feb 1968), 214–27. Scholes, Robert, Paradoxy of Modernism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Scholes, Robert and Cliff Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010.

Works Cited

257

Scholes, Robert and Sean Latham, ‘The Rise of Periodical Studies’, PMLA, 121.2 (March 2005), 517–31. Schuchard, Ronald, ‘ “As Regarding Rhythm”: Yeats and the Imagists’, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, 2 (1984), 209–26. Schwartz, Sanford, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Schwartz, Sanford, ‘Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism’, in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, eds. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 277–78. Sherry, Vincent, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Shiff, Richard, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Shook, John R., ‘F. C. S. Schiller and European Pragmatism’, in A Companion to Pragmatism, eds. John R., Shook and Joseph Margolis. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Shortt, S. E. D., Victorian Lunacy: Richard M. Bucke and the Practice of Late Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Shortt, S. E. D., ‘The Myth of a Canadian Boswell: Dr. R. M. Bucke and Walt Whitman’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 1.2 (1984), 55–70. Silber, Evelyn, The Sculpture of Epstein: with a Complete Catalogue. Oxford: Phaidon, 1986. Silver, Kenneth, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989. Sonn, Richard, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Spalding, Frances, Roger Fry: Art and Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. Stanley, John L., The Sociology of Virtue: The Political and Social Theories of George Sorel. Berkeley: University of California. Press, 1981. Stears, Marc, ‘Guild Socialism and Ideological Diversity on the British Left, 1914–1926’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 3.3 (1998), 289–305. Stears, Marc, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State. 1909–1926. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Steele, Tom, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 1893–1923. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990. Sternhell, Zeev, La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914. Les origines françaises du fascisme. Paris: Seuil, 1978. Sternhell, Zeev, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Sternhell, Zeev, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; repr. 1994. Stock, Noel, The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Stone, Dan, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002. Surette, Leon, ‘Ezra Pound and British Radicalism’, English Studies in Canada, 9.4 (Dec. 1983), 435–51.

258

Works Cited

Surette, Leon, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Surette, Leon, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Sutton, Michael, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Swart, Koenraad W., The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France. The Hague: Martin us Nijhoff, 1964. Tannenbaum, Edward R., The Action Française: Die-hard Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century France. New York: John Wiley, 1962. Taupin, Rene, L’Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine (de 1910 à 1920). Paris: H. Champion, 1929. Taupin, Rene, The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry, trans. by William Pratt and Anne Rich Pratt. New York: AMS Press. 1985. Taylor, Paul Beekman, Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium. York Beach: Weiser Books, 2001. Tiffany, Daniel, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Thacker, Andrew, ‘Dora Marsden and The Egoist: “Our War With Words” ’, English Literature in Transition: 1880–1920, 36 (1993), 179–96. Thacker, Andrew, ‘A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language’, in T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism, eds. Andrzej Gasiorek and Edward Comentale. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp. 39–55. Thatcher, David, Nietzsche in England 1890–1914: The Growth of a Reputation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970. Thomas, Hugh, The Spanish Civil War. London: Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965. Tickner, Lisa, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Tonning, Erik, Modernism and Christianity. Basingtoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Tratner, Michael, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Trotter, David, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Tryphonopoulos, Demetres, The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos”. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992. Turner, Frank, Between Science and Religion: Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Varias, Alexander, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives During the Fin-de-Siècle. London: Macmillan, 1997. Villis, Tom, Reaction and the Avant-Garde: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy in Early Twentieth Century Britain. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Vincent, Andrew, ‘German Philosophy and British Public Policy: Richard Burdon Haldane in Theory and Practice’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 68.1 (2007), 157–79.

Works Cited

259

Warwick, Andrew, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Webb, James, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers. New York: Putnam, 1980. Weber, Eugen, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962. Weber, Max, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1903–1917), ed. and trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: Free Press, 1997. Wees, William C., Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Weinstein, Leo, Hippolyte Taine. New York: Twayne, 1972. Wellek, René, ‘Emerson and German Philosophy’, New England Quarterly, 16 (1943), 41–62. Wellek, René, ‘French “Classical Criticism” in the Twentieth Century’, Yale French Studies, 38 (1967), 47–71. White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Whitworth, Michael, ‘T. E. Hulme’s Quotations from Milton and Ireton’, Notes and Queries, 43 (1996), 441–43. Whitworth, Michael, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wicke, Jennifer, ‘Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble’, Modernism/ Modernity, 8.3 (2001), 389–403. Wilcox, Denys J., The London Group: The Artists and their Works. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995. Williams, Louise B., ‘British Modernism, History, and Totalitarianism: The Case of T.E. Hulme’, CLIO, 23.3 (1994), 257–69. Williams, Louise B., Modernism and the Ideology of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Chatto and Windus, 1959. Williams, Raymond, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953; repr. 2001. Wohl, Robert, The Generation of 1914. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Wolfe, Willard, From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian Socialist Doctrines, 1881–89. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Woodcock, George, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956. Yeo, Stephen, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896’, History Workshop, 4 (1977), 5–56.

Index Locators followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. ABC tea shop 4 Abrams, M. H. 95 n.58 abstraction (art) 7, 170, 190, 195, 196, 200 abstraction (psychology) 17–20, 37, 39, 48, 49 Académie française 109 Action française 13, 17, 34, 104–21, 129 n.14, 189, 192, 193, 201, 211, 212–13 Acton, Lord 99 n.124, 206, 229 Adamson, Walter 133 n.67 ‘agonistic politics’ 2, 10, 14–17, 206, 216, 232, 233 Aldington, Richard 4 Allied Artists Association 144 American constitution 17, 24 n.74, 117 American transcendentalism 64, 69, 71 anarchism 1, 9, 17, 18 n.2, 25, 27, 29, 34, 42, 44, 45, 46 n.1, 54 n.97, 54 n.99, 57, 58, 78, 89, 111, 124, 154, 204 Anglicanism 61, 92 n.21, 136 n.113, 227 n.163, 231, 232 Anglo-Catholicism 207, 216, 222 n.80 antagonistic politics 233 anti-humanism 8, 190, 204 anti-intellectualism 66, 69, 79, 109, 187 Antliff, Allan 46 n.1 Antliff, Mark 12, 22 n.49, 34, 48 n.27, 107, 110, 118, 132 n.41, 145, 235 n.2 Ardis, Ann 11, 21 n.43, 22 n.44, 58, 64, 90 n.2, 91 n.6, 91 n.12, 149, 175 n.60, 204, 205, 214 Arifiglio 175 n.59, 179 n.122 Aristotle 26, 47 n.13, 130 n.30 Arnold, Matthew 75, 94 n.45 Arts and Crafts Movement 158, 178 n.96 Arya: A Philosophical Review 95 n.65 Ashbee, C. R. 158, 178 n.96 Ashton, Rosemary 20 n.24 Asquith, H. H. 82

Asquith, Raymond 234 Attila the Hun 143 Auden, W. H. 2, 229, 235 n.1; ‘A Letter to Lord Byron’ 229, 235 n.1 Augustinian theodicy 215 Aurobindo, Swami 67, 72, 95 n.65; The Life Divine 67, 95 n.65 Avery, Todd 203 Babbitt, Irving 63, 93–4 n.35 Bakhtinian dialogics 10, 21 n.43 Bakunin, Mikhail 34, 42 Balzac, Honoré de 205 Baron, Wendy 173 n.37, 179 n.108 Bateson, William 70 Bax, Ernest Belfort 80–2, 84, 100 n.142; The Fraud of Feminism 81; The Roots of Reality 80 Beasley, Rebecca 90 n.2, 141, 171 n.2, 175 n.60, 223 n.95, 235 Beaunier, André 29, 31–3, 40; La Poésie nouvelle 29, 31 Bell, Clive 13, 17, 157, 165, 203, 223 n.88 Bell, Vanessa 155 Belle epoque 110 Belloc, Hilaire 10, 86, 122, 123, 232; The Party System 123; The Servile State 123 Bennett, Arnold 10 Berenson, Bernard 146, 156, 170–1 n.2; Florentine Painters of the Renaissance 156 Bergson, Henri 2, 4, 5, 9, 15, 16; attacked by Action française 104, 105, 130–1 n.30, 133 n.62; echoes in New Age mysticism 60–3, 69, 72–4, 91 n.9, 91 n.10, 92 n.20, 93 n.30, 97 n.95, 98 n.102; echoes in New Age socialism 57–60, 68, 69; Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience

262

Index

(Time and Free Will) 16, 40, 49 n.35, 187, 220 n.27; Hulme’s mediation with Maurras 115, 116, 118, 128, 134 n.71; Hulme’s persistent interest in 120–1; Hulme’s turn against 119, 133 n.57, 134 n.77; influence on Catholics and conservatives 13, 15–16, 123; influence on crowd psychology 113, 114, 195, 196; influence on forms of ‘classicism’ 109–11, 132 n.41; influence on Hulme’s ‘mature philosophy’ 200, 202, 203; influence on Hulme’s revolutionary language 79–81, 83, 84, 103, 109; influence on Hulme’s visual aesthetic 140, 145, 146, 156, 157, 159–61, 173 n.27; influence on Italian pragmatists 184; influence on poetic theory 33, 34, 118, 234; influence on Sorel 187, 188, 194–6, 220 n.42; ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’ (Introduction to Metaphysics) 53 n.83, 69, 73, 97 n.96, 98 n.104; ‘Intuition Philosophique’ (‘Philosophical Intuition’) 40, 53 n.81, 97 n.96, 117; La Pensée et le mouvant (The Creative Mind) 53 n.81; legacy in ‘agonistic liberalism’ 16, 230, 233; Le Rire (Laughter) 40, 52–3 n.80, 146, 159; L’Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution) 40, 53 n.82, 72, 97 n.95, 109, 116, 173 n.27, 220 n.28; Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory) 73; theory of the image 35, 36, 38, 39–41, 47 n.6, 49 n.35, 51–2 n.69, 53 n.83, 53 n.86 Bergsonism 4, 9, 15, 31, 33, 57, 59, 61, 79–81, 93 n.30, 109, 118, 128, 134 n.71, 200 Berkeley, George 47 n.13 Berlin, Isaiah 16, 233, 236 n.17, 236 n.21; ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ 16, 233 Berth, Édouard 109, 111 Bevan, Robert 5 Bevir, Mark 64, 94 n.48, 142, 229 Bhagavad Gita, The 67, 76 ‘Bicameral’ liberalism 16, 233 Binckes, Faith 21 n.40, 174 n.48

Bismarck, Otto von 77, 209 Blast 4, 142, 172 n.20, 194 Blavatsky, Madame 58 Blond, Philip 232 Blondel, Maurice 15 Bloomsbury Group, the 13, 145, 147, 154–9, 203 Boakes, Robert 97 n.98 Boccioni, Umberto 185 Bomberg, David 4, 14, 33, 141, 147, 151, 162, 163–70, 176 n.75, 180 n.139, 181 n.155, 194, 195, 229, 235 n.2; Family Bereavement 170; In the Hold 166–8; The Mud Bath 168–70; Sappers at Work 181 n.155; Visions of Ezekiel 170 Bouquet, Mary 20 n.31 Boutroux, €mile 62 ‘Bovarysme’ 85, 90, 106 Bowler, Peter 92 n.21, 136 n.113 Bradshaw, David 20 n.29 Brecht, Bertolt 205, 223 n.101 Brighton Pavilion 124 British Museum 199 Broke, Willoughby de 106–7 Brooke, Rupert 4, 234 Brooker, Peter 18 n.7 Brown, Callum 20 n.27 Brown, Ford Madox 167; Work 167 Bucke, Richard 71–2, 97 n.88, 97 n.89; Cosmic Consciousness 71–2 Bullen, J. B. 170 n.1, 171 n.5 Burke, Edmund 19 n.19, 107 Burlington Magazine, the 145 Burrow, John 61 Bush, Ronald 5, 6, 50 n.44, 81 Byzantinism 118, 144, 147, 148, 151, 155 Caballero, Giménez 226 n.151, 227 n.165 Cabaret Theatre Club, The 159 Café Royal 5, 207, 208 Cambridge Magazine, The 203 Cambridge Mathematics Tripos 25, 39, 46 n.3, 46 n.4, 203, 218 Cambridge University 25, 39, 46 n.3, 46 n.4, 120, 136 n.106, 155, 158, 203, 218 Camden Town Group, the 144, 147, 159–63, 169, 173 n.37, 179 n.108

Index Camelots du Roi, the 104, 131 n.34, 132 n.42 Campbell, Joseph 45 Čapek, Karel 151; R.U.R. 151 Capetian Regime 158 Carey, John 19 n.15, 175 n.63 Carfax Gallery 160, 174 n.55 Carlyle, Thomas 7, 75, 94 n.45, 99 n.123 Carpenter, Edward 60–9, 71–6, 80, 82, 88, 95 n.59, 96 n.66, 96 n.71, 97 n.89, 149, 154, 158, 178 n.96, 195, 201, 215; From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta 68, 71, 96 n.66; The Art of Creation 74; ‘Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure’ 66–7; The Drama of Life and Death 74; Forecasts of the Coming Century 65; Towards Democracy 63–4, 69 Carpenter, Niles 99 n.127, 214, 226 n.151 Carr, Helen 23 n.59, 32, 46, 48–9 n.28, 134 n.82, 135 n.85, 134 n.86 Carrà, Carlo 185 Carswell, John 94 n.37 Carter, Huntly 145–6, 146 Cartesian rationalism 108, 116, 118 Casa Italia 184 Catholic Revival 34, 123–4, 221 n.64 Catholicism 75, 92 n.21, 109, 118, 123–5, 127, 136 n.113, 202, 207, 216, 221 n.64, 222 n.80, 231 Cercle Proudhon 109, 111, 131 n.34, 132 n.41, 212, 213 Cézanne, Paul 34, 139, 144, 145, 155, 160–1 C.G.T. (Confédération générale du travail) 194 Chandos Group 217, 227 n.163, 231 Chenil Gallery 167–8 Chesterton, G. K. 10, 16, 24 n.67, 24 n.68, 86, 122, 123–4, 136 n.110, 217, 232; Orthodoxy 124 Christendom Group 217, 227 n.163, 231 Christian Sociology 231 Christianity 14, 23 n.63, 24 n.68, 43, 87, 88, 127, 136 n.113, 215, 232 Churchill, Suzanne 10, 21 n.41 Cité française 111, 132 n.41 Clark Papers, the 225 n.136 Clarke, Bruce 9 ‘classicism’ 8, 13, 29, 32–3, 34, 81, 103–28, 140, 144–5, 147, 156–9, 189, 190, 208

263

Claude (Lorrain, Claude) 144 Clouard, Henri 109–10 Cocteau, Jean 110 Cole, G. D. H. 99 n.124, 206, 214, 216, 217, 227 n.151 Cole, Margaret 217 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 120 Collège de France 36, 97 n.95, 187 Collini, Stefan 231 Colum, Padraic 45 communism 12 Comte, Auguste 66, 104, 108, 111 Condorcet, Nicolas de 121 Connolly, William 16, 230, 233, 235–6 n.8; Pluralism 16, 230, 233, 235 n.8; Political Theory and Morality 19 n.21; The Terms of Political Discourse 235 n.8 Contemporary Review, the 75 Corbett, David Peters 159, 178 n.101 Cork, Richard 151, 153, 154, 165–9, 177 n.88, 177 n.89, 180 n.136, 181 n.155 Corneille, Pierre 110 Corridor Philosophy 117, 133 n.65, 183–5 Cottington, David 107 Coyle, Michael 204 Criterion, the 229 Croce, Benedetto 63, 93–4 n.35, 184, 185 Cromwell, Oliver 211 crowd psychology 19 n.19, 84, 105, 111–15, 119, 132 n.51, 167, 192, 195, 197 Csengeri, Karen 9, 47 n.10, 50 n.46, 133 n.57, 140, 198 Cubism (Cubists) 34, 110, 111, 139, 140, 145, 146, 155, 159–61, 163 C.W.G.C. (Commonwealth War Graves Commission) 234 Dangerfield, George 18 n.5, 46, 172 n.14 Darwin, Charles 27, 38, 47 n.13, 51 n.66, 52 n.74, 70, 71, 86, 96 n.75, 96 n.77, 143, 200; The Descent of Man 70; The Origin of Species 70, 96 n.77 David, Jacques-Louis 110 Davidson, John 96 n.67 Davie, Donald 21 n.38, 46 ‘daylight mysticism’ 61 decadence 31–5, 161, 190, 197, 206, 215 Déclaration de la Cité francaise 132 n.41

264

Index

Delap, Lucy 21 n.43 DeLeonibus, Gaetano 48 n.27, 107, 130 n.23 Demant, Vigo 217, 231, 232 democracy 1, 3, 6, 16–17, 19 n.18, 19 n.19, 24 n.74, 34, 38, 63–4, 69, 77, 82, 104, 117, 123, 186, 188–9, 191, 193–4, 196, 197, 208–12, 215 Denis, Maurice 34, 110, 111, 118, 131 n.38, 132 n.41, 145, 156–7, 158, 171 n.3 Derain, André 139 Descartes, René 105, 111 Dionysus 78, 89, 150, 151 diremption 12, 191–3, 210, 221 n.43, 221 n.49, 235–6 n.8 ‘Discord Club’ the 14, 25, 28, 46, 55 n.100, 120 Douglas, Major C. H. 204 Dreyfus Case, the 29, 104, 108, 123 Duguit, Léon 206, 207, 214, 224 n.111 Dukes, Ashley 134 n.72, 218 Durkheimian ‘disenchantment’ 61, 92 n.22 Eagle and the Serpent, the 54 n.97, 54 n.99 Eagleton, Terry 7 Eder, M. D. 80; ‘The New Psychology’ 80 Edwards, Paul 27, 45, 141, 163 Egoist, the 6, 10, 17, 44, 58, 61, 68, 90 n.1, 90 n.3, 141, 162, 172 n.16, 204 Eisenstein, Sergei 196–7; Battleship Potemkin 197; Strike 197 Eliot, T. S. 1, 2, 4, 10, 13, 63, 81, 217, 227 n.163, 229, 231–2, 236 n.12 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 67, 154 empathy (Einfühlung) 17, 140, 146, 150, 156, 190 English Civil War 210, 211, 214, 225 n.136 Enlightenment, the 6, 107, 108, 113, 118, 190 entelechy 87, 101 n.163 epiphenomenalism 87, 101 n.163 Epstein, Jacob 4, 14, 33, 93 n.33, 147–54, 160, 162, 163, 171 n.10, 175 n.60, 176 n.73, 176 n.75, 176 n.77, 176 n.78, 177 n.85, 177 n.86, 177 n.88, 177 n.89, 218, 229; Birth drawings 147; Carvings in Flenite 147; Cursed be the Day Wherein I was Born 153; Rock Drill 147, 151–4, 166, 176 n.73, 176 n.75, 176 n.78

Esprit classique 108, 113 Etchells, Frederick 4, 155 Fabian Arts Society 75, 77, 99 n.125 Fabian Society 3, 99 n.127, 112, 177 n.87 Falkenheim, Jacqueline 173 n.38 Fall, the 57, 59, 66–7, 123, 124, 201, 206, 231, 233 Farr, Florence 45, 93 n.27, 100 n.147 Fasci di Combattimento 185 fascism 1, 9–13, 18, 18 n.2, 21 n.38, 46, 106, 109, 117, 134 n.72, 136–7 n.116, 150, 185, 197, 205, 206, 212, 214, 216, 217, 227 n.162, 230, 232–4 Fauvism 145 Ferguson, Robert 55 n.100, 55 n.101, 61, 222 n.80, 235 n.1 Ferrall, Charles 13 Feuerbach, Ludwig 7, 27, 43, 44, 48 n.14; The Essence of Christianity 43 Figgis, John Neville 99 n.124, 206 Fitzgerald, Desmond 45 Fitzroy Street Group 4, 144 Flint, F. S. 4, 19 n.14, 45, 46, 58, 76, 85, 93 n.27, 119–20, 143, 150 Florentine pragmatists 117, 133 n.67, 184–6 Foucault, Michel 20 n.27 Fraser, Nancy 21–2 n.43 Freeden, Michael 12–13, 22 n.50, 23 n.58, 95 n.60, 79, 185, 193, 194, 205, 208, 233, 235–6 n.8–9 French Revolution, the 104 Freudian psychology 4 Frith Street salon 2–4, 55 n.100, 159, 160 Fry, Roger 13, 17, 34, 139–40, 142, 144–5, 147, 155–60, 170 n.1, 170 n.2, 178 n.96, 179 n.110, 203, 234; ‘Art and Life’ 157–8; ‘Art and the Great Society’ 157–8; ‘Essay in Aesthetics’ 157; Vision and Design 157 Futurism 139, 140, 185 Gaceta literaria, La 214, 226 n.151 Gallie, Donald 23 n.58, 231 Galton, Francis 8, 20 n.30, 35, 37–9, 40–2, 51–2 n.69, 51 n.65, 51 n.66, 51 n.68, 52 n.70, 52 n.74, 52 n.75, 163, 202; Hereditary Genius 39; Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development

Index 51 n.65, 51 n.68; Papers on mental imagery 37, 39, 41, 51 n.65, 51 n.68, 52 n.72, 52 n.73 Garner, Les 90 n.1 Garver, Lee 12, 23 n.55, 79, 81, 83, 180 n.140, 180 n.142, 195 Gasiorek, Andrzej 198 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 162, 235 n.2 Gauguin, Paul 139, 144 Gaultier, Jules de 85, 90, 106, 115, 116, 133 n.59, 188; Le Bovarysme 85 Gautier, Théophile 31, 33, 40; Émaux et camées 31 ‘Generation of 1898’ the 204 Gentile, Emilio 22 n.50, 24 n.65, 235–6 n.8 Georgian poets 4 German Idealism 7 Gibbons, Tom 13, 18 n.2, 23 n.56, 76 Gilbert, Pierre 132 n.41, 154 Gill, Eric 154, 177 n.86, 177 n.87 Gilman, Harold 4, 144, 159–60, 162, 169, 178–9 n.107 Ginner, Charles 4, 10, 13, 17, 159–62, 178–9 n.107, 179 n.111, 181 n.151 Ginzburg, Carlo 9, 51 n.66 Giotto (Giotto di Bondone) 170 n.2 Gnosticism 66 Goldie, David 21 n.40 Goldman, Emma 154 Gooch, G. P. 225 n.136; History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century 211, 225 n.136 Gore, Spencer 4, 144, 178 n.106, 179 n.123 Gourmont, Remy de 29, 36, 42–4, 53 n.86, 53 n.88, 54 n.90, 54 n.93, 69, 83, 110, 234; Le Problème du style 29, 43–4, 54 n.90, 54 n.93, 54 n.94 Grafton Group, the 155, 159 Grant, Duncan 155; Adam and Eve 155 Gray, John 16, 24 n.70, 24 n.73, 233, 236 n.17; Enlightenment’s Wake 236 n.21; The Silence of the Animals 24 n.73, 236 n.17 Grayson, Victor 78–9, 85 ‘Great Chain of Being,’ the 70, 96 n.79, 200 Great War, the 2–3, 176 n.75, 194, 234 Green, Christopher 170 n.1, 173 n.38 Green, T. H. 83

265

Greene, Vivien 235 n.2 Gregor, A. James 219 n.5 Gregory, Maundy 100 n.133 Grenon, Russell 134 n.73 Grey, Edward 82, 112 Griffin, Roger 11–12, 20 n.28, 22 n.47–50, 24 n.66, 46, 55 n.108, 229, 232, 235 n.3, 235 n.8, 236 n.15 Griffith, Gareth 65, 95 n.57 Griffiths, Richard 123, 135 n.105, 136 n.107 Grogin, R. C. 80, 130–1 n.30, Groos, Karl 146 Guild Socialism 4, 59, 60, 69, 85, 90, 99 n.127, 100 n.132, 128, 141, 153, 154, 158, 204, 206, 214, 229, 233, 235–6 n.8 Gurdjieff, G. I. 4, 62, 90, 93 n.33 Guyau, Jean-Marie 33, 50 n.46 Habermas, Jurgen 11, 21–2 n.43 Hadjiyiannis, Christos 55 n.107 Haldane, Richard Burdon 82–4, 101 n.150, 101 n.151, 114, 120; The Pathway to Reality (Gifford Lectures) 83 Hallberg, Robert van 9, 10 Hardie, Keir 63, 78, 89 Harding, Jason 21–2 n.43, 21 n.40 Harrison, Charles 131 n.38 Hastings, Beatrice 10, 82, 149, 175 n.59, 175 n.60 Hegel, G. W. F. 7, 26–7, 43, 48 n.14, 49 n.30, 66, 67–9, 83, 95 n.61, 153; The Phenomenology of Spirit 66, 153 Heraclitus 47 n.10, 70 Herbert, James 107 Heretics Society, the 136 n.106 hermeticism 66, 110 Hobhouse, Leonard 83 Hobson, S. G. 78–9, 90, 99 n.124, 128, 177 n.88, 205, 206, 213, 217; Functional Socialism 213, 217 Hobson, Suzanne 24 n.66, 92 n.18, 136 n.113 Hollingsworth, J. H. 218 Holt, Ysanne 159 Hough, Graham 48 n.17 House, John 170 n.1 House of Commons, the 78 House of Lords, the 3, 86, 106

266

Index

Hübener, Gustav 117 Hueffer, Ford Madox 120 Hughes, H. Stuart 18 n.8, 61, 92 n.22, 187 Hulme, T. E.: affinities with Italian pragmatism 117, 185, 233; affinities with Orage’s ‘conservative ethic’ 85–90, 122–3, 213–17; affinities with Orage’s spiritual interests 57–63, 67, 70, 72, 90, 199–201; affinities with socialism 44–6, 57–60, 79–85, 204–17; affinity with Catholic Revivalists 123–5, 127; anarchist tendency 1, 12, 17, 25, 27–30, 34, 42, 44, 45, 46 n.1, 57–9, 104, 134 n.72, 141, 154, 212–3, 233, 234; ‘A Notebook’ 96 n.81, 186, 198–203, 219 n.19, 219 n.20, 222 n.68, 222 n.69, 222 n.75, 222 n.77, 222 n.82, 222 n.83, 222 n.86, 222 n.87, 222 n.176, 223 n.90, 224 n.110, 227 n.170; ‘A Note on the Art of Political Conversion’ 22 n.53, 112–14, 128 n.9, 128 n.11, 132 n.45, 132 n.46, 133 n.52, 133 n.53, 133 n.56, 133 n.64–6, 184, 192, 197, 219 n.9, 220 n.37, 221 n.50, 222 n.80; arrest in London 25, 39, 84; ‘A Tory Philosophy’ 103, 121, 128 n.1, 128 n.2, 128 n.5, 129 n.19, 135 n.89–91, 138 n.131, 173 n.27, 221 n.60, 225 n.121, 225 n.124; attacks Ludovici 148–51; attends Manet and Post-Impressionists exhibition 139; background and education 2, 25, 46 n.3, 46 n.4; ‘Bax on Bergson’ 93 n.30, 134 n.77; ‘Belated Romanticism’ 55 n.104; ‘Bergsonism in Paris’ [Letter] 117, 134 n.71; ‘Bergson Lecturing’ 91 n.10, 93 n.30, 98 n.102, 134 n.77, 134 n.78, 171 n.6, 173 n.34; ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ 119, 134 n.81, 140, 146, 156, 159, 161, 174 n.42, 174 n.51, 178 n.105, 179 n.114; ‘Cinders’ 26, 30, 32, 47 n.8, 47 n.10, 47 n.12, 47 n.30, 128 n.6, 129 n.15, 165, 181 n.155, 186, 218, 219 n.20; collaboration with Ramiro de Maeztu and Orage 204–17; Collected Writings of T. E.

Hulme 19 n.12; debt to Fry 144–5; debt to Le Bon 15, 112, 114, 119, 192, 194–7, 234; debt to Taine 31, 84, 107–8, 112–13, 118, 192, 194–7; defends Epstein 148–50; ‘Diary from the Trenches’ 183, 186, 218 n.2, 220 n.24; emphasis on Original Sin 58, 90, 103, 120, 123, 136 n.106, 197, 201, 207, 208, 230; friendship with artists 2, 10, 33, 139, 145, 147, 160; friendship with Orage 3; Frith Street Salon 2–5; Further Speculations 47 n.5, 218 n.2; Haldane and Gaultier 79–85; hostility to Fry and the Bloomsbury Group 154–9; ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’ 199; and Imagism 2, 4–8, 13, 14, 17, 31, 37, 38, 40–2, 46, 55 n.100, 55 n.105, 58, 60, 61, 63, 68, 72–4, 106, 114, 119–21, 134 n.81, 141, 187, 194, 197, 234; influence of Bergson (see Bergson 1909 articles on Bax); influence of French poetry 29, 31, 32, 34, 36, 39, 40, 42–3, 49 n.38, 53 n.86, 110, 111, 118; influence of neo-realist philosophers (Husserl and Moore) 3, 15, 186, 189, 198–203, 206, 207; influence of Worringer 146–7, 151, 156; interest in Action française 13, 17, 104–21, 129 n.14, 129 n.18, 132 n.42, 189, 192, 193, 201, 210, 211–13; interest in Pascal 198, 201–3; interest in Sorel 3, 13, 89, 116, 121, 140, 143, 145, 167, 187–98, 205, 208–9, 211, 212–3, 231, 233, 234; involvement with Orage’s circle 3, 6, 12–13, 17, 44–5, 57–60, 79–85, 122, 166, 167, 188, 194–5, 204, 208, 213; killed 218; lack of clarity in theory of abstraction 164–5; leadership of ‘the Discord Club’ 25; ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ 19 n.12, 26, 30–5, 40, 46, 48–9 n.28, 48 n.28, 49 n.29, 49 n.31, 49 n.36, 49 n.39, 49 n.40, 50 n.45–7, 50 n.50, 50 n.52, 50 n.56, 81, 103, 114, 120, 128 n.6, 133 n.52, 133 n.62, 146, 159, 160, 174 n.50, 178 n.102; ‘Modern Art II - A

Index Preface Note and Neo-Realism’ 160, 179 n.112, 179 n.113, 179 n.115, 179 n.117; ‘Modern Art III -The London Group’ 162, 164, 179 n.118, 180 n.128, 180 n.130, 180 n.133, 180 n.141; ‘Modern Art I -The Grafton Group’ 155–9, 177 n.91, 178 n.97; ‘Modern Art IV - Mr. David Bomberg’s Show’ 164–5, 167, 180 n.136, 180 n.137, 180 n.141, 181 n.146; ‘Mr. Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’ 91 n.10, 98 n.102, 133 n.59, 133 n.61–3, 134 n.79; ‘Mr. Epstein and the Critics’ 147–54, 171 n.10, 175 n.56, 175 n.64, 221 n.60, 225 n.125; on nominalism and realism 17, 26–9, 35, 43, 47 n.10, 104, 143, 170, 198, 200, 201, 203, 234; ‘Notes on Bergson’ 47 n.6, 47 n.9, 93 n.30, 100 n.140, 134 n.80, 203, 220 n.26, 222 n.85; ‘Notes on Language and Style’ 26, 28, 30, 32, 48 n.19, 49 n.30, 53 n.86, 112, 132 n.47, 159; ‘Notes on the Bologna Congress’ 116–7, 122, 128 n.11, 133 n.56, 133 n.64, 133 n.98, 135 n.96, 136 n.106, 171 n.9, 220 n.34; ‘On Progress and Democracy’ 24 n.74, 117, 129 n.17, 134 n.70, 138 n.137, 220 n.34; part of the ‘revolt against positivism’ 5; philosophical interests 2–3; place in modernist canon 1, 2, 4–5, 9, 229; ‘Plan for a Book on Modern Theories of Art’ 146, 175 n.52; poetic theory 2, 6, 8, 13, 14, 17, 28–46, 72, 73, 84, 114–15, 118, 120–1, 141, 194, 196, 197, 234; political theory 1–2; praise of Bomberg 163–70; reading in British psychology 35, 37–41, 202; reading in French psychology 35–44, 113, 146, 194, 195, 234; reading in German empathetic theory 146–7, 156; recuperates in London 183; redefines ‘classicism’ 8, 13, 33–4, 81, 103–28, 140, 144–5, 147, 157–9, 189, 190, 208; re-enlists in Royal Marine Artillery 217–8; relationship to other conservatives

267 13, 122–8; relationship with Camden Town Group and criticism of Neo-Realism 159–63; relationship with Lewis 163–4; ‘religious attitude’ 202–3; reputation for reactionary politics 1, 9–10, 13, 46, 106, 109–10, 117, 131 n.34; ‘Review: L’Attitude du lyrisme contemporain’ 49 n.35, 118, 134 n.74; role at the New Age 3, 10–11, 14, 44–5, 57–60, 79–85, 106, 115, 122, 125–6, 128, 141, 148, 149, 187, 189, 204, 208, 214; role in formation of the London Group 160; role in promoting British art 2; role in the School of Images 14, 45, 55 n.100; ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ 33, 97 n.84, 103, 120–1, 125, 128 n.1, 129 n.18, 132 n.42, 135 n.87, 156, 171 n.3, 173 n.27, 174 n.42, 178 n.93, 222 n.72; ‘Rules 1908’ 45, 55 n.101; ‘Searchers after Reality’ series 80–5, 100 n.143, 101 n.156, 101 n.159, 128 n.6, 133 n.52, 133 n.55, 133 n.60; sees action in St. Eloi 183; Speculations 3, 9, 20 n.35, 47 n.5, 119, 134 n.81, 174 n.52, 199, 227 n.174, 235 n.1; spiritual ideas 15–16; ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’ 23 n.59; ‘The New Philosophy’ 22 n.46, 47 n.7, 79–80, 84, 126, 137 n.127, 137 n.129; theories of democracy, authority and liberty 204–17; ‘Theory and Practice’ 173 n.27; ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’ 119, 134 n.81; ‘The Translator’s Preface to Sorel’s Reflections on Violence 23 n.53, 187, 208, 209, 220 n.34, 220 n.36, 220 n.38, 221 n.44, 221 n.52, 224 n.111, 224 n.116, 224 n.118, 225 n.119, 226 n.141, 226 n.145; time in Canada and Belgium 2, 25; as a Tory 2, 17, 44, 59, 60, 85, 103, 106–7, 121, 122, 125–8, 195, 208, 209, 230, 232, 233; ‘Trenches St. Eloi’ 183, 186–7, 218; trip to France and Italy 116; ‘War Notes’ 24 n.74,, 173 n.34, 186, 193, 205, 209,

268

Index

210–13, 220 n.24–6, 221 n.53, 223 n.88, 225 n.120, 225 n.125, 225 n.127, 225 n.128, 225 n.130–2, 225 n.135, 226 n.140, 226 n.141, 226 n.146; as war poet 183–7, 234–45; wounded in war 3, 183 humanism 93 n.29, 105, 127, 140, 157, 190, 199, 201, 215 humanitarianism 59, 216 Hume, David 38, 47 n.13, 113 Humphrey, Richard 221 n.43 Husserl, Edmund 3, 15, 186, 189, 199, 202–3, 206, 207 Huxley, T. H. 35, 38, 51 n.69, 52 n.70, 70, 86, 101 n.163, 101 n.161; ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata and Its History’ 101 n.161, 101 n.163 Huyssen, Andreas 19 n.15 Hynes, Samuel 47 n.5, 183, 224 n.114, 227 n.173

Jackson, Holbrook 3, 44, 54 n.99, 69, 75, 77–8, 80, 96 n.74; The EighteenNineties 54 n.99, 80 Jackson, Paul 22 n.48 James, William 5, 16, 18 n.10, 38, 52 n.70, 52 n.79, 62, 63, 71, 79, 81, 83–5, 90, 93–4 n.35, 97, 102 n.170, 103, 111, 116–7, 133 n.65, 143, 167, 184, 219 n.4, 219 n.8, 230, 232, 233; A Pluralistic Universe 16, 79, 116, 219 n.4; Pragmatism 102 n.170, 117, 133 n.65, 184, 219 n.4; The Principles of Psychology 18 n.10, 52 n.70, 52 n.79; ‘The Will to Believe’ 63, 90, 94 n.36, 199; The Varieties of Religious Experience 71, 97 n.90 Joan of Arc 188 Jodock, Darrel 23 n.62, 92 n.21, 136 n.113 Johnson, Josephine 93

Ibsen, Henrik 58 ‘Ideal Home Rumpus,’ the 145, 177 n.90 idealistic morphology 70 Idée fixe, the 112–13, 192, 194, 195 Il Devinire sociale 185 Imagism 2, 4–9, 11, 13, 14, 17, 21 n.38, 23 n.59, 31, 37, 38, 40–2, 46, 55 n.100, 55 n.105, 55 n.107, 58, 60–1, 63, 68, 72–4, 90 n.2, 91 n.3, 106, 114, 119–21, 134 n.81, 134 n.82, 135 n.85, 141, 143, 172 n.16, 172 n.20, 172 n.21, 187, 194, 197, 204, 234 impressionism 33, 110, 144, 146, 159, 160, 170 n.2 Indépendance, L’ 111, 132 n.41 Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) 3, 75, 78 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 110, 144 Institut d’Action française 109 International Philosophical Congress 116 Irenean Theodicy 215 Ireton, Henry 211 Irish Literary Society 45 Irish nationalism 14, 45 Isaiah 77 Italian fascism 217, 227 n.162

Kadlec, David 12, 18 n.1, 18 n.2, 101 n.158, 180 n.140, 194, 230 Kahn, Gustave 29, 31–3, 49 n.33, 110; Premiers poèmes 29, 31, 49 n.33 Kandinsky, Wassily 163, 164 Kantian philosophy 6, 63, 80, 126, 144, 146, 156 ‘Karma Yoga’ 102 n.166, 102 n.171 Kayman, Martin 172 n.21 Keats, John 120 Keele University Library 48 n.28 Kennedy, Ellen 130 n.30 Kennedy, J. M. 10, 13, 17, 59, 76, 122, 125–8, 136–7 n.116, 137 n.122, 137 n.123, 138 n.135, 138 n.138, 150, 175 n.65, 207, 208; ‘A Tory Democracy’ (article series) 125, 127, 128, 137 n.118, 137 n.120, 138 n.134; English Literature 1880–1905 125, 137 n.119; The Quintessence of Nietzsche 76, 99 n.120, 126, 127, 138 n.133, 138 n.135; ‘The Book of the Week [Who Is To Be the Master of the World?]’ 138 n.136; Tory Democracy 137 n.118, 137 n.120, 138 n.134 Kenney, Rowland 207, 217, 232 Kensington Town Hall 93 n.31

Index Kermode, Frank 20 n.36, 62, 93–4 n.35, 129 n.20, 198 Kiernan, Edward 136 n.111 Klima, Gyula 47 n.11 Koheleth 77 Kojecky, Roger 227 n.163 Kuenzli, Katherine 145 Kuhn, Thomas 20 n.27 Kurlberg, Jonas 236 n.11 Labour Leader, the 63–5 Labour movement, the 3, 64, 75, 78, 99 n.129, 100 n.133, 154–5, 166–7, 176 n.77, 196, 217 Lagrange, Henri 109, 131 n.34 Lasserre, Pierre 13, 17, 85, 104, 105, 108–11, 115–22, 128 n.12, 129 n.13, 130–1 n.30, 133 n.59, 133 n.62, 134 n.72, 180 n.139, 213,226 n.145; La Morale du Nietzsche 108, 130 n.28; Romantisme français 108, 121, 130 n.28 Le Bon, Gustave 112, 114, 115, 119, 132 n.51, 192, 194–7, 234; La psychologie des foules (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind) 114 Le Claire, Lesley 225 n.136 Le Mouvement socialiste 185, 187 Le Roy, Édouard 15, 100 n.139 Lechmere, Kate 4, 48 n.28, 136 n.112, 164, 224 n.114 Lee, Vernon 146, 156 Leeds Art Club 3, 18 n.4, 69, 75, 94 n.37, 96 n.74, 98 n.109 Lehmann, A. G. 49 n.37 Leighten, Patricia 18 n.1, 50 n.53, 110, 131 n.37, 132 n.41 Leonardo 184 Levellers, the 211 Levenson, Michael 9, 12, 18 n.2, 25, 32, 58, 61, 91 n.6, 93 n.29, 128 n.10, 139, 140 Levy, Oscar 10, 86, 122, 125–6, 136–7 n.116, 208 Lewis, Percy Wyndham 4, 10, 13, 17, 62, 93 n.31, 141–2, 143, 145, 147, 149, 150, 155, 158–60, 162–4, 166, 172 n.20, 204, 223 n.91, 229; Kermesse 204; ‘Long Live the Vortex’ 172 n.19; ‘Round Robin’ 155, 158

269

Lewis, Pericles 24 n.66 liberalism 60, 66, 83, 99 n.124, 104, 112, 117, 123, 127, 190, 205, 223 n.103, 232, 233 libertarianism 1, 25, 30, 58, 122, 131 n.33, 141, 154 liberty 59, 77, 143, 156, 158, 205–6, 209, 210–11, 212, 214, 223 n.103, 224 n.106, 224 n.110, 233 Liebregts, Peter 61, 91 n.5, 135 n.85, 220 n.22 Linneaus, Carl 70 Lipps, Theodor 17, 146 Lloyd Morgan, Conwy 38, 52 n.70 Locke, John 47 n.13, 51 n.64, 113 London Group, the 55 n.100, 142, 160, 162, 164, 166, 169, 173 n.37, 179 n.108, 179 n.110 ‘London Impressionists,’ the 144, 159 Longenbach, James 186 Lovejoy, Arthur 96 n.79 Ludovici, Anthony 106, 122, 125–8, 136–7 n.116, 137 n.122, 138 n.138; Who Is To be Master of the World? 76, 125 MacAlister, Donald 39, 52 n.75, 202 Macdonald, Ramsey 78 Mackay, John Henry 43 Maeztu, Ramiro de 99 n.124, 124, 158, 189, 194, 195, 204–17 Maine de Biran, François-Pierre-Gonthier 118 Mairet, Philip 96 n.74, 98 n.107, 100 n.132, 100 n.134, 217, 231 Maistre, Joseph de 107, 108 Maitland, F. W. 99 n.124, 206, 229 Man-God, the 117, 133 n.68 Manet and the Post-Impressionists (exhibition) 139 Mannheim, Karl 232 Mansfield, Katherine 4 Marat, Jean-Paul 118 Marinetti, Filippo 185 Maritain, Jacques 15, 124, 136 n.107, 202, 232, 236 n.12 Marsden, Dora 44, 58, 68, 141, 172 n.16 Marsh, Edward 134 n.72, 218, 227 n.169 Martin, Wallace 9, 36, 53 n.86, 59–60, 62, 112, 125

270

Index

Marx, Karl 16, 27, 43, 48 n.14, 54 n.96, 64– 5, 75, 80–2, 86, 87, 153, 189, 190–1, 193, 197, 220 n.42, 223 n.101, 236 n.21; Das Kapital 64; The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 80 Mathematics Tripos 25, 39, 46 n.3, 46 n.4, 52 n.74, 52 n.75, 218 Mathers, MacGregor 20 Matisse, Henri 139 Maurras, Charles 13, 17, 33, 34, 85, 104–5, 107–11, 113, 115, 116, 118–19, 122–4, 128, 128 n.12, 129 n.13, 130 n.27, 130 n.30, 132 n.41, 132 n.50, 140, 145, 148, 157, 158, 180 n.139, 190, 191, 193, 209–13, 217, 236 n.12 Mayr, Ernst 70 McCarthy, Fiona 177 n.86, 177 n.87 McKible, Adam 21–2 n.43, 21 n.40 McLennan, David 54 n.96 McWilliam, Neil 48 n.27, 107, 130 n.23, 132 n.41 Mead, G. R. S. 60, 62, 93 n.31 Medievalism 75, 78 Mendilow, Jonathan 94 n.44 ‘Métèques’ 108 Michel, Walter 172 n.19, 174 n.47 Milbank, John 24 n.68, 232 Milburn, Diane 77, 83 Milton, John 211, 225 n.134 Mithouard, Adrien 110 Modernist Journals Project 21 n.40 Monism 15, 61, 63, 64, 66, 123, 151, 215 Monistic idealism 66, 95 n.61 Monro, Harold 4, 121 Moore, G. E. 3, 15, 186, 189, 199, 202, 203, 206, 207, 214, 222 n.83 Moot, the 232, 236 n.11 Morelli, Giovanni 144 Morowitz, Laura 107, 130 n.23, 131 n.40 Morris, William 4, 7, 45, 60, 65, 77, 158 Morrisson, Mark 21 n.43 Mouffe, Chantal 16, 24 n.71, 233, 236 n.21, 236 n.22 Muir, Edwin 4, 76, 98 n.118 Munton, Alan 179 n.124, 180 n.127 Murray, D. L. 105, 116, 129 n.13, 184 Murry, John Middleton 21 n.40, 94 n.37, 118, 145–6, 232 Musil, Robert 61

Mussolini, Benito 20 n.28, 185, 197, 216, 217, 219 n.5, 219 n.16 mysticism 3, 4, 24 n.66, 61–2, 72, 93 n.25, 186 Nation, The 158, 172 n.23, 174 n.41, 174 n.45 National Guilds 128, 138 n.138 National Insurance Bill 3, 86, 106 National Portrait Gallery 158 ‘negative identification’ 84 Neoplatonism 72, 91 n.5, 93 n.24, 97, 120, 135 n.85, 220 Neo-Realism (artistic) 160, 178–9 n.107, 179 n.111, 179 n.112 Neo-Realism (philosophical) 189, 203, 207, 208, 222 n.83 Neo-Thomism 34 Nevinson, Christopher 155, 179 n.109 New Age, the 3–4, 6, 7–8, 10–12, 14, 17, 18 n.6, 22 n.48, 44–5, 57–60, 62–5, 68, 74–9, 81–3, 85, 87, 89, 90 n.2, 91 n.9, 99 n.129, 99 n.124, 99 n.125, 99 n.127, 100 n.134, 106, 115–17, 119, 122, 123, 125–8, 136–7 n.116, 136 n.109, 137 n.122, 137 n.123, 141, 143, 145–51, 153–5, 158, 160, 162, 171, 174 n.48, 179 n.122, 187–9, 191, 194, 195, 203, 204, 207, 208, 210, 214, 216, 217, 223 n.93, 224 n.118, 229, 231, 235–6 n.8 New English Art Club 144, 159, 178 n.107 New Freewoman, the 58, 90 n.1 New Liberalism 3, 66, 83, 95 n.60, 98 n.112, 101 n.154, 123 New Model Army 211 New Testament 211 New Women 14, 82, 100 n.147 Newcastle High School 46 n.4 newspaper industry 6 Nicholls, Peter 19 n.13, 46, 55 n.108 Nicolson, Benedict 145 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 5, 9, 13, 15, 27, 34, 36, 38, 42–4, 53 n.86, 53 n.88, 54 n.92, 54 n.93, 58–9, 60, 69, 72, 75, 76–7, 78, 83, 85–90, 92 n.20, 96 n.67, 96 n.74, 99 n.123, 106, 108, 111, 117, 125, 126–8, 137 n.122,

Index 138 n.138, 143, 148–9, 184, 187, 188, 190, 197, 202, 209–10, 211, 220 n.42, 233, 235; The Birth of Tragedy 187; The Genealogy of Morals 108, 117, 126, 148, 153; Human, All Too Human 151; Nietzsches Werke 53 n.88; ‘On Truth and Lies in a NonMoral Sense’ 9, 42–3, 126; Thoughts out of Season 125; The Twilight of the Idols 86, 117, 126 Nietzscheanism 4, 83, 125 Nineteenth Century, the 128 Nolte, Ernst 129 n.14 nominalism 17, 26–9, 35, 43, 47 n.10, 47 n.11, 48 n.14, 104, 105, 143, 144, 170, 198, 200, 201, 203 North, Michael 6–7, 11, 19 n.20 Nozick, Martin 227 n.164 Nye, Robert 132 n.51 Oakeshott, Michael 16, 24 n.69; Rationalism in Politics 16 Occident, L’ 110–11 occultism 60, 61, 91 n.9 Oddie, William 135 Ogden, C. K 133 n.59, 185, 188, 203, 229, 235 n.1 Omega Workshop 141–2, 157–8, 160, 174 n.47 Oppenheim, Janet 60, 91 n.9, 92 n.17 Orage, A. R.: ‘An Editor’s Progress’ 91 n.7, 125, 177 n.88; approves of Hulme’s writing 122; articles for the Labour Leader 63–9; articles for the Theosophical Review and Contemporary Review 75; attitude to elitism 76–7; background in Leeds 3; belief in Original Sin 122–5; belief in redemption 215–6; closeness to Bergsonian vitalism 73–4; collaborates with Hulme and Maeztu 213–18; comments on Hulme’s art theory and Epstein’s sculpture 149, 153–4; Consciousness, Animal, Human, and Superhuman 69–74, 96 n.82, 97 n.85, 97 n.87, 97 n.94, 97 n.100, 98 n.103, 98 n.108, 102 n.164, 200; conservative ethic 57, 85–90, 122–5; debt to Edward Carpenter

271

and Eastern religions 69; debt to Richard Bucke 71–2; disapproves of radical right Nietzscheans 126–8, 149–50, 153–4; as editor of the New Age 3–4, 74–9; lectures on ‘Consciousness’ 69–74; links to the Quest Society 62; mystical and theosophical interests 57–74, 86–9, 217; Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism 98 n.108, 101 n.162, 102 n.175, 177 n.84; Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age 98 n.108, 99 n.119, 102 n.177, 137 n.125; as part of Hulme’s social network 3–4; pragmatism 62–3; publishes Hulme from 1909 79–85; purchase of the New Age with Holbrook Jackson 77–8; radical tendency as New Age editor 78–9; ‘Readers and Writers’ 91 n.12, 93–4 n.35, 136 n.109, 138 n.138, 149, 153, 175 n.60, 175 n.61, 177 n.80, 177 n.81, 214, 222 n.74, 222 n.94, 223 n.93, 226 n.148, 226 n.152, 226 n.153, 226 n.155; related to continental radicalism 44; Review of From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta 68–9, 96 n.71, 96 n.72; Review of ‘Towards Democracy’ 63–4, 94 n.41, 94 n.43; shares Hulme’s conservative ethic 85–90; socialism 57–79; ‘Towards Socialism’ 87–90, 98 n.117, 99 n.123, 101 n.163, 102 n.165, 102 n.167, 102 n.172, 102 n.173, 123, 135 n.100; ‘Unedited Opinions’ 92 n.14, 95 n.64, 96 n.67, 98 n.102, 98 n.106, 98 n.117, 99 n.123, 101 n.163, 122, 135 n.95, 135 n.99; vitalism 57–8; writing on the Guild idea 75, 77 Original Sin 57, 59, 67, 90, 103, 120, 123, 124, 127, 136 n.106, 197, 201, 206–8, 216, 230, 231, 233 Otis, Laura 173 n.35 Otter, Sandra den 20 n.24, 95 n.60, 101 n.154 Ouspensky, P. D. 217, 227 n.161 Owen, Alex 60, 61, 91 n.9, 92 n.20 Oxford English Dictionary 192, 221 n.49

272

Index

Pantheism 61, 66 Papini, Giovanni 117; Il Crepuscolo dei filosofi 133 n.68, 184, 219 n.7, 219 n.8; ‘Pragmatismo messo in ordine’ 133 n.65, 219 n.8 Parliament Bill 86 Parnassians, the 31–4, 40, 49 n.35 Pascal, Blaise 90, 118, 143, 158, 177 n.87, 186, 189, 198, 201–2; Pensées 15, 202, 221 n.64, 222 n.78 Pascal’s Wager 202, 203, 208, 221 n.64, 222 n.77–9, 232, 234 Pascendi Dominici Gregis 15 Péguy, Charles 123, 124, 130 n.30, 136 n.107, 187, 202 Penty, Arthur 75, 78, 98 n.111, 99 n.124, 99 n.126, 123, 124, 136 n.111, 177 n.88, 206; The Restoration of the Gild System 75, 98 n.111, 99 n.126; ‘The Restoration of Beauty to Life’ 99 n.126 Perry, Ralph Barton 219 n.5, 219 n.17 pessimism 103, 189, 194, 197 Picasso 18 n.1, 130 n.23, 139, 145, 170; Guernica 170 Pierson, Stanley 94 n.44, 95 n.49, 98 n.110, 98 n.113, 100 n.142 Piller, Christian 222 n.83 Platonism 5, 10, 26, 37, 47 n.10, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66–8, 70, 72, 76, 91 n.5, 93 n.24, 97 n.95, 99 n.123, 120, 135 n.85, 137 n.122, 145, 156, 186, 220 n.22 Plotinus 97 n.95; Enneads 97 n.95 pluralism 1, 2, 14–17, 24 n.71, 24 n.72, 29, 45, 46, 57, 77, 79, 99 n.124, 103, 116, 117, 122, 140, 154, 167, 171 n.9, 184, 195, 197, 206, 208, 212, 213, 216, 217, 229–31, 232, 233, 235–6 n.8, 235 n.6, 236 n.18, 236 n.21, 236 n.22 Poets’ Club, the 14, 30, 45, 46, 48 n.28–9, 55 n.104 Pogson, F. L. 187 Polanyi, Karl 232 Popper, Karl 16; The Open Society and Its Enemies 16 Por, Odon 217 positivism 5, 6, 8, 13, 17, 18 n.8, 31, 35–7, 39, 41, 83, 100 n.142, 108, 109, 112, 124, 187, 201, 202, 234

Post-Impressionism 139, 142, 144–6, 155, 156, 159, 170 n.1, 171 n.13, 174 n.46, 205 Pound, Ezra 1, 2, 4, 6, 10–13, 17, 23 n.59, 45, 55 n.100, 58, 60–2, 68, 91 n.5, 91 n.12, 93 n.27, 93 n.31, 119–20, 134 n.85, 141–3, 149, 150, 163, 166, 172 n.15, 172 n.16, 172 n.20, 179 n.122, 183, 186, 194, 197, 204–5, 217, 220 n.22, 223 n.98, 227 n.162, 234; ‘Affirmations: Vorticism’ 186, 220 n.22; ‘A Study in French Poets’ 173 n.26; ‘Edward Wadsworth, Vorticist’ 172 n.18, 173 n.25; ‘He Pulled His Weight’ 223 n.98; ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ 135 n.84; Literary Essays 135 n.84; ‘Obituary: A.R. Orage: In the Wounds’ 223 n.98; ‘Prolegomena’ 135 n.84; ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’ 62, 93 n.28; Ripostes 23; Selected Essays 135 n.84; ‘Status Rerum’ 172 n.17; ‘Suffragettes’ 221 n.54; ‘The New Sculpture’ 173 n.31 Poussin, Nicolas 110, 144 Praz, Mario 220 n.41 Prezzolini, Guiseppe 117, 133 n.65, 133 n.66, 133 n.68, 184, 185, 219 n.5, 219 n.8, 219 n.16 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 24 n.58 Protestantism 108, 127 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 109, 111, 131 n.34, 132 n.41, 189, 190, 193, 194, 211, 212–3, 226 n.137, 226 n.142, 226 n.145, 230, 234; De la Justice dans la révolution et dans l’Église 212, 226 n.137; Guerre et Paix 212 Putney Debates, the 211, 225 n.136 ‘Quatre états confédérés’ 108–9 Quest, The 62, 93 n.28, 93 n.31 Quest Society, the 62, 93 n.31 Racine, Jean 110 radical individualism 1, 12, 17, 30, 59, 104 Radical Orthodoxy 24 n.68, 232, 236 n.14 Rae, Patricia 28, 47 n.10, 49 n.38, 52 n.77, 61, 62, 93 n.25, 103, 106, 107, 121, 129 n.20, 143, 162, 163, 167, 180 n.126, 198, 199, 221 n.67

Index Railway Workers’ Strike 78 Rappel a l’ordre 110, 170 Read, Herbert 20 n.35, 47 n.5, 48 n.19, 96 n.74, 218, 227 n.174 Reckitt, Maurice 99 n.124, 123, 135 n.102, 217, 227 n.163, 227 n.167, 231, 232 Red Toryism 232, 236 n.13 redemption 88, 123, 124, 127, 201, 214–16, 231 Redman, Tim 91 n.5, 204, 223 n.96, 223 n.97, 227 n.162 Reed, Christopher 158, 170 n.2, 173 n.38, 178 n.96, 178 n.99 Reformation, the 108, 127 Renaissance 34, 110, 127, 144, 148, 156, 157, 189, 211, 214, 229 Renan, Ernest 107 Republicanism 108 Rerum Novarum 123 Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, the 4, 23 n.59, 45 Revue critique des idées et des livres 109–11 Revue philosophique 36 R. H. C. see Orage Ribot, Theodule 35, 36–7, 38, 39–44, 50 n.60, 51–2 n.69, 52 n.71, 53 n.86, 53 n.87, 69, 72, 111–13, 146, 194, 195, 234; Essai sur l’imagination créatrice 39–41; L’Évolution des idées générales 36–9, 50 n.60, 72 Richards, I. A. 229 Riegl, Alois 146 Rights of Man 59 Roberts, Michael 47 n.5, 48 n.28, 134 n.72 Roberts, William 4, 176 n.75 Robespierre, Maximilien,á118 Robins, Anna Gruetzner 170 n.1, 174 n.49, 178 n.103, 178 n.107, 179 n.120–3 Robinson, Alan 136 n.115, 159, 178 n.104 Rogger, Hans 131 n.32 Romanes, George John 38, 40, 47 n.13, 51–2 n.69, 52 n.70, 52 n.71, 71–3, 97 n.97, 97 n.98; Mental Evolution in Animals 51–2 n.69, 71; Mental Evolution in Man 38, 47 n.13, 51–2 n.69, 52 n.71, 71

273

romanticism 2, 13, 27, 30, 33, 34, 49 n.30, 55 n.104, 64, 66, 103, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 115, 120–1, 124, 125, 140, 190, 206; American 66, 94 n.44–6, 95 n.48 Rosenberg, Isaac 234 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 19 n.19, 59, 104, 108, 189 Rowbotham, Sheila 74, 95 n.59 Royal Academy 144, 176 n.73 Royal Albert Hall 144 Royal Marine Artillery 3, 217–8 Royalism 34, 108, 109, 128 n.8, 129 n.14, 132 n.42, 132 n.49, 209 Rubin, Adrienne 173 n.38 Rue Sorbonne 187 Ruse, Michael 96 n.75 Ruskin, John 7, 45, 58, 60, 64, 65, 77, 91 n.5, 94 n.45, 154, 158, 178 n.96 Russell, Bertrand 13, 47 n.11, 189, 199, 203, 214, 222 n.83, 223 n.88; ‘A Free Man’s Worship’ 203; The Problems of Philosophy 47 n.11 Rutter, Frank 144, 171 n.13; Revolution in Art 171 n.13 Ryan, Judith 61, 93 n.25 Saint Simon, Henri de 121 Salisbury, Lord 87, 114 Salon des Indépendants, the 144 Samurai 76, 99 n.125 Saturday Review, the 30 Scala naturae 70 Schapiro, J. Selwyn 226 n.142 Schevzik’s Vapour Baths 168 Schiller, F. C. S. 93–4 n.35, 116, 117, 133 n.65, 184, 219 n.11 Schneidau, Herbert 142, 173 n.28 Scholes, Robert 21 n.40, 21 n.42, 174 n.48 ‘School of Images’ the 14, 45, 55 n.100 Schuchard, Ronald 48 n.28 Schwartz, Sanford 5, 18 n.9, 19 n.11 ‘Secession Club’ the 14, 55 n.100, 100 n.147 Second Empire 31 Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition 145, 174 n.41 Selver, Paul 151, 176 n.74 Shackleton, Ernest 89

274

Index

Shaw, George Bernard 10, 58, 65, 77, 78, 92 n.57, 93 n.27, 95 n.56, 99 n.125; ‘The Illusions of Socialism’ 95 n.56 Sherry, Vincent 48–9 n.28, 50 n.45 Shiff, Richard 34, 50 n.54, 145, 174 n.45, 178 n.94 Shortt, S. D. 97 n.88, 97 n.89 Sickert, Walter 4, 10, 13, 17, 141, 144, 146, 147, 159–60, 162–3, 168–9, 178–9 n.107, 178 n.101, 179 n.122, 181 n.145, 204, 223 n.91; Noctes Ambrosianae 169 Silber, Evelyn 154, 176 n.77, 177 n.79, 177 n.85 Silver, Kenneth 107, 130 n.23 Simpson, Henry 55 n.101 Skinner, Paul 92 n.18 Social Credit 4, 65, 91 n.5, 136 n.114, 204 Social Darwinism 143 Social Democratic Federation (S.D.F.) 3, 81, 82 Socialist Representation Committee 78 Soffici, Ardengo 185 Soho 2, 4, 159 Sonn, Richard 48 n.26 Sorel, George 3, 12, 13, 16, 17, 22–3 n.53, 24 n.74, 63, 65, 89, 93–4 n.35, 109–10, 111, 115, 116, 121–3, 130 n.30, 131, 132 n.41, 135 n.93, 140, 143, 145, 167, 183–5, 187–99, 202, 203, 205, 208, 209, 211–13, 219 n.13, 220 n.27–9, 220 n.31–3, 220 n.40–2, 221 n.43, 221 n.56–8, 221 n.64, 224 n.117, 224 n.118, 231, 233, 235–6 n.8, 236 n.23; Les Illusions du progrès 121, 135 n.93, 187, 192; Réflexions sur la violence 123, 185, 187–92, 197 Spalding, Frances 178 n.96, 178 n.100 Spencer, Herbert 66, 202 Staël, Madame de 107 Stanley, John 221 n.43 Stears, Marc 12, 22 n.52, 79, 99 n.124, 100 n.137, 224 n.105, 229, 235–6 n.8, 235 n.6 Steele, Tom 18 n.4, 75, 94 n.37, 94 n.39, 96 n.74, 98 n.109, 100 n.130 St. Eloi 218 St. John’s College, Cambridge 46 n.4 Stepelevich, Lawrence 19 n.23, 54 n.96, 54 n.97

Sternhell, Zeev 18 n.2, 131 n.32–4, 212, 226 n.139 Stevens, Mary Anne 170 n.1 Stirner, Max 7, 12–13, 15, 27, 34, 38, 42, 43–4, 48 n.14, 54 n.96, 54 n.97, 54 n.99, 58, 68, 141, 204; The Ego and His Own 43, 44, 54 n.97, 54 n.98 Stone, Dan 76, 98 n.119, 136–7 n.116 Storer, Edward 45, 55 n.105 Storm und Drang 63 Suffragette movement 3, 12, 45, 79, 81, 82, 84, 221 n.54 Sunday Times, the 144 Surette, Leon 60, 91 n.5, 92 n.17, 93 n.31 Sutton, Michael 130 n.27 Symbolism 31–2, 36, 43, 50 n.61, 53 n.86, 61, 62, 110 Symons, Arthur 31, 32, 49 n.39; The Symbolist Movement in Literature 31, 49 n.39 syndicalism 12, 101 n.158, 109, 115, 131 n.33, 131 n.34, 142, 166, 167, 172 n.15, 176 n.77, 180 n.140, 185, 187–9, 191, 194, 195, 197, 221 n.54 Taine, Hippolyte 19 n.19, 31, 49 n.35, 51 n.64, 84, 107, 108, 112–13, 118, 132 n.49–51, 192–7 Tancred, F. W. 45 Tate Gallery, the 172 n.20, 174 n.54, 235 n.2 Tawney, R. H. 214, 217, 226 n.151 Taylor, Charles 19 n.21 Teoria Sindicalista, La 184 Teresa Billington-Grieg 82, 100 n.147 ‘Terror’ the 107, 113 Thacker, Andrew 21 n.40, 91 n.3, 172 n.16, 222 n.81 Thatcher, David 71, 97 n.87 Theosophy 4, 61, 75 Third Republic, the 29, 34, 104, 107, 115, 131 n.33, 132 n.51 Thomas, Edward 234 Thomas, Hugh 224 n.104 Thomism 34 Tickner, Lisa 180 n.139 Tiffany, Daniel 172 n.21 T. K. L. see Hastings, Beatrice Tonning, Erik 23 n.63, 24 n.66, 24 n.68, 232, 236 n.16

Index Tory Die-Hards 106 Toryism 24 n.68, 44, 59, 60, 103, 126, 195, 230, 232, 233 Trakl, George 234 Transport Workers’ Strike 194 Tratner, Michael 19 n.20 Trotter, David 175 n.63 Tryphonopoulos, Demetres 17, 60, 93 n.31 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 121 Turner, Frank 61, 92 n.22 Übermenschen 59, 108, 127, 209 Underhill, Evelyn 62 Unitarianism 64 University College London 25, 119, 125, 150 Uomo-dio 117, 133 n.68 Upanishads, the 67 Upstone, Robert 235 n.2 Upward, Allen 60, 92 n.18, 93 n.29, 136 n.113, 136 n.113 utopianism 3, 7, 16, 88, 123, 190, 220 n.42, 221 n.57 Vaihinger, Hans 62, 63, 90, 93–4 n.35, 106; The Philosophy of As-If 90, 93 n.35 Valois, Georges 109, 111, 131 n.33, 132 n.41, 131 n.34, 212, 213 Van Gogh, Vincent 139, 145 Varias, Alexander 48 n.26 Variot, Jean 132 n.41 Vedantic religions 66–8, 72, 87, 88, 95 n.61 Vers libre 2, 31, 32, 40, 118 Vico, Giambattista 193 Villis, Tom 13, 19 n.18, 23 n.56, 34, 50 n.55, 123, 135 n.103, 136 n.115, 137 n.122 Visan, Tancrède de 34, 49 n.35, 110, 118, 132 n.41, 134 n.73, 134 n.74 Vischer, Friedrich 146 Vivekananda, Swami 88, 102 n.166, 102 n.170, 102 n.171 Vlaminck, Maurice de 139 Voce 184, 185 Volkelt, Johannes 165, 180 n.136 Vorticism 11, 58, 141–3, 149, 163, 164, 167, 172 n.20, 175 n.60, 179–80 n.124, 180 n.126, 186, 205, 235 n.2 Vries, Hugo de 70, 173 n.27

275

Wagnerianism 32 Wallas, Graham 112, 132 n.44; Human Nature in Politics 112, 132 n.44 War Poets, the 234 Ward, A. H. 62 Ward, Graham 24 n.68 Warwick, Andrew 46 n.3 Webb, Beatrice 76, 78, 99 n.125, 177 n.87 Webb, James 227 n.161 Webb, Sidney 76, 78, 99 n.125, 177 n.87 Weber, Eugen 110, 115, 128 n.8, 129 n.14, 131 n.32, 131 n.33, 131 n.42 Wees, William C. 164, 172 n.14, 179 n.124, 180 n.129 Weinstein, Leo 132 n.49 Wellek, René 95 n.47, 129 n.21 Wells, H. G. 65, 76, 78, 99 n.125; A Modern Utopia 78 Western Front, the 143, 169, 170, 183, 235 Whistler, James McNeill 33, 146, 159, 160, 171 n.2 White, Hayden 20 n.27 Whitman, Walt 63–6, 69, 71, 94 n.38, 97 n.89, 154; Leaves of Grass 63, 94 n.38; ‘Song of Myself’ 94 n.38 Whitworth, Michael 172 n.21, 211 Wilcox, Denys 173 n.37, 179 n.108 Wildon Carr, H. 184 Williams, Louise 121, 129 n.13, 135 n.92 Williams, Raymond 7, 19 n.20, 20 n.26, 84, 101 n.158, 129 n.13 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 9, 12, 23 n.54, 51 n.66, 202, 222, 222 n.81 Wohl, Robert 219 n.12 Wolfe, Willard 98 n.112 Wood, Paul 131 n.38 Woodcock, George 226 n.137 Worcester College, Oxford 225 n.136 Worringer, Wilhelm 17, 50 n.45, 140, 146–8, 150, 151, 156–8, 171 n.10, 171 n.11, 176 n.72, 190, 194; Abstraction and Empathy 146, 150, 151, 175 n.67; Form in Gothic 151 ‘Wranglers’ 25, 46 n.4 Yeats, W. B. 1, 92 n.20, 93 n.27 Young Hegelians, the 7, 27, 43