T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism

Andrzej Gasiorek, Edward P. Comentale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754640882
• eBook ISBN: 9781317047100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Though only 34 years old at the time of his death in 1917, T.E. Hulme had already taken his place at the center of pre-war London's advanced intellectual circles. His work as poet, critic, philosopher, aesthetician, and political theorist helped define several major aesthetic and political movements, including imagism and Vorticism. Despite his influence, however, the man T.S. Eliot described as 'classical, reactionary, and revolutionary' has until very recently been neglected by scholars, and T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism is the first essay collection to offer an in-depth exploration of Hulme's thought. While each essay highlights a different aspect of Hulme's work on the overlapping discourses of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, taken together they demonstrate a shared belief in Hulme's decisive importance to the emergence of modernism and to the many categories that still govern our thinking about it. In addition to the editors, contributors include Todd Avery, Rebecca Beasley, C.D. Blanton, Helen Carr, Paul Edwards, Lee Garver, Jesse Matz, Alan Munton, and Andrew Thacker.

Chapter 1
The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks

Paul Edwards

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

J. B. Harmer, in his study of Imagism, says that Hulme ‘gave up poetry in a fruitless search for intellectual satisfaction’, and he asserts that Hulme will survive by his poems rather than his ideas (p. 52). The essays in this volume show that to be an oversimplification, but it is true that the syntheses (or balanced antitheses) of ideas Hulme was looking for are best served through imagery rather than philosophical argument – at least as he developed it. But the fact that the same imagery can be found in the early notebooks (particularly ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’) as well as in more formal prose pieces – shows that a simple division between poet and man of ideas is artificial. Hulme’s poems are ideas, but treated with such delicacy that explication (betraying them to the ‘extensive manifold’) is a questionable activity.1 But explication of the overlapping modes of thought and imagery Hulme employed is nevertheless the purpose of this chapter.

In Hulme, then, we have an example of a thinker whose ideas are all, and always, secondary to emotion, feeling and physical impulse. Even his belief in permanent, transcendent values and in God rests on this: ‘It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities’ (CW, p. 61). Hulme has long been thought of as a self-contradictory thinker, and in response to this, attempts have been made to show his inconsistencies as the product of commentators’ demands that ideas he had outgrown should be consistent with what he believed later in his development. Certainly the arrangement of Speculations obscured the fact that Hulme was developing and changing his ideas and exploring their implications until the end. But there are inconsistencies along the way, at any particular moment, as well, and it is only as a process of sorting out and reconciling these inconsistencies as he begins to become conscious of them that Hulme’s development acquires any sort of coherence. What Hulme finally does, in what Karen Csengeri misleadingly (in my view) calls his ‘mature philosophy’, is to wall up his various beliefs within separate discourses, claiming that they are quite independent of each other: ‘There must be an absolute division between each of the three regions, a kind of chasm. There must be no continuous leading gradually from one to the other’ (CW, p. 425).

The three regions referred to are ‘(1) The inorganic world, of mathematical and physical science, (2) the organic world, dealt with by biology, psychology and history, and (3) the world of ethical and religious values’ (CW, p. 424). It is not a mature philosophy but a step towards abandoning philosophy altogether in favor of religious faith and practice (CW, p. 432). Because of dissatisfaction with the ‘nightmare of determinism’ implicit in region 1, region 2 is invented, and an unpredictable evolutionary novelty is assigned to it; the (Bergsonian) discourse that is the correlate of region 2 implies a creativity and unlimited potential for man as a life form. But it also makes values a by-product of evolutionary processes and hence lacking in any absolute claim on us. As a corrective, resort is made to a transcendent region of absolute values which makes the ‘creativity’ of region 2 look like a tiny and uninteresting variation of a fundamentally fixed condition.2 Each region has been psychologically needed by Hulme in order both to limit the others and to supplement what is unsatisfactory in each of them; but even as he delineates the three ‘separate’ regions he recognizes the similarity of regions 1 and 3 (in that for him they both have an absolute ‘objective’ character), and it could hardly have been long before his psychological need for region 2 dissipated. Indeed, he had already devoted nearly the whole of the fifth of his ‘Notes on Bergson’ (5 Feb. 1912) to a psychological analysis of how the ‘nightmare of mechanism’ could suddenly cease to be nightmarish, and stated that ‘the simplest way of dealing with mechanism is frankly to accept it as a true account of the nature of the universe, but at the same time to hold that this fact makes no difference to ethical values’ (CW, p. 151).3 What he has momentarily forgotten is that only with the freedom postulated by region 2 can human beings be logically subject to the ethical values of region 3. If there is an absolute gulf between these regions, and each is a separate language game, it is philosophically feeble to resort to one in order to escape from the limitations of the others. (This is leaving aside the contentious question of whether these regions are, anyway, actually separate.)

As always with Hulme (and this is one of his main attractions), in ‘A Notebook’ we are told the process of how and why he has reached his new position and come to believe that mind is a repository of transcendent values, and Hulme himself recognizes that, as the result of a process, his assertions, though ‘a first step away from subjectivism … still remain tainted with it’ (CW, p. 421). Parallel to this, when he predicts a ‘classical revival’ in culture, the classicism that is to come will recapitulate his own development and not look very classical because it will have ‘passed through a romantic period’ (CW, p. 65).

Hulme’s late ‘philosophy’, then, is a classification of desires, tidying them up conceptually so that they know their place. It is only thus, presumably, that he can make sense of the fact that he has been capable of irreconcilable impulses. Insofar as those impulses have found expression as ideas, he had, during his short writing life, allowed them expression as occasion demanded, hence his ‘contradictions’ – notoriously between his Bergsonism and his anti-romanticism – so that even in some of his earliest writings there are apparently anomalous intrusions of ideas that will later become central preoccupations. When he first set out, however, he was more ready to let contradictions meet, and it was thus that they became fruitful.

In his desire for clear, absolute distinctions in the late ‘Notebook’, Hulme disparages ‘region 2’ (the one to which he is now confining his Bergsonism) as a ‘muddy mixed zone’, while his other two regions exhibit geometrical perfection. The middle zone is ‘covered with some confused muddy substance’ (CW, p. 425). ‘Mechanism’ is no longer a ‘nightmare’ for Hulme – it was never his chief nightmare – and he no longer accepts the claims of Bergson to lift life and ‘matter’ into the realms of spirit. The image of ‘mud’ that Hulme uses here is of great significance – if we begin to read him in a literary rather than philosophical way. For it takes us back to the early notebooks and papers published as ‘Cinders’ and ‘Notes on Language and Style’, from which Bergson is absent.4 Mud, along with ashes, there stands for the undifferentiated substance into which all phenomena can be resolved. Bergsonism thus begins to appear to be a huge detour in the development of Hulme’s ‘search for reality’, as he finally moves towards assuaging his fears through a resort to entirely traditional belief systems and religious practices (using, as an amateur, whatever philosophical ideas are expedient in justifying this to himself). The claims of Bergson to assuage his fears by electrifying the muddy region 2 with élan vital no longer appeal to the Hulme of ‘A Notebook’.

To say that Hulme did not succeed in solving his problems through a coherent and original philosophy is simply to confirm that he is not a great philosopher (no one has claimed this status for him, however), not to deny the reality of the problems. It is always possible, of course, that had he survived the First World War he would have produced a convincing philosophical solution to the problems, but failing this, we need to return to the melting pot of his speculative industry, where literary reading is required to supplement philosophical sorting. For Hulme, imagery was primary, not simply illustrative of arguments. Hence his Johnsonian criterion, ‘What would … a carter in the Leek road think of it all?’ (CW, p. 8).

By approaching him through imagery we can see that the chief nightmare for Hulme appeared not to be mechanism but isolation in a universe that has no inherent characteristics or human qualities. This universe is figured in the early notes as cinders or mud. ‘Cinders’ appears to be his preferred image because it carries the suggestion of separation and discontinuity, whereas mud (though equally intractable and a more traditional image for an ur-substance) suggests homogeneity without discontinuity. (The image also carries other connotations to which I shall return.) Hulme’s original conception of language appeared to be more Nietzschean than Bergsonian. Language, a web of communication between people with desires and purposes in common, constructs pathways among the cinders, and these socially constructed conveniences are taken to be reality, whereas they are simply short cuts that get mapped in culture. Because language is common, and because the evolutionary goals of human beings and other life forms remain constant, Hulme believes he has escaped the charge of total relativism that Protagoras’ principle of ‘man the measure of all things’ implies (CW, p. 8). Whether this is justified or not, the important thing is the communal basis of this construction of an expedient reality through language: ‘Through all the ages, the conversation of ten men sitting together is what holds the world together’ (CW, p. 14). Hulme was, as I have mentioned, characterized by Ezra Pound as ‘the Pickwickian Englishman who starts a club’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 58). Robert Ferguson reprints Hulme’s ‘Rules 1908’, which formed the constitution of the ‘Poets’ Club’: twelve rules that, from the first (‘The Club shall be called the “Poets’ Club,” and shall consist of not more than fifty members’), to the last (prescribing the method of electing new members), with, in between, details of the officers and titles, place and times of meeting, procedures at dinners, price of dinners eaten and dinners missed, length of papers to be discussed and protocols for contributions from the floor, number of guests to be invited, in one short page conjures up from a chance shared interest the picture of a stable, well-ordered society ready to deal with any contingency, housed in its own comfortable premises ‘above Rumpelmeyer’s’ in St James Street, London. The document is a microcosm of Hulme’s conception of the construction of reality – and reading it we cannot help (probably wrongly) inferring the existence of a well-disciplined and carefully structured reality, an efficient going concern.

The tone of ‘Cinders’ is frequently disparaging of such inferences insofar as they are applied macrocosmically, and Hulme is often insistent on the need to set aside the ‘disease’ of language that overlays the cinderheaps and substitutes itself for them. But it is essential to realize that, however skeptical he was about its ultimate foundations, the club was essential for him: indeed it was essential because of his skepticism and the underlying fear of isolation in an ocean of ashes. ‘Living language is a house’, he decides (CW, p. 33), and ‘the bad is fundamental, and … the good is artificially built up in it and out of it, like oases in the desert, or as cheerful houses in the storm’ (CW, p. 10). When he writes, in one of the fragments that Alun R. Jones collected under the title ‘Images’, ‘Old Houses were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling’ (Jones, 1960, p. 180) it is not difficult to guess the reaction of the ‘carter in the Leek Road’. Whether he thought it worth bothering with or not, he would take it as a simple statement of fact. I do not wish to dissolve the fact into allegory, even while I wish to insist on certain resonances to the lines. Only with some knowledge of Hulme’s thought could any metaphysical implication be definitely assigned to the image, which can be unfolded without reference to it. First, we have here a contrast between what is solid (and reliable) now – the old houses that we imagine standing four-square and enduring – and its earlier non-existence except as space enclosed by scaffolding. Emotions cluster round this contrast. Second, we have an image of the workmen, co-operating in the erection of the wooden scaffolding, perhaps climbing to a dangerous height while they build up the house inside, and insouciantly whistling while they do so. The security of the old house contrasts with its precarious process of construction out of (it would seem) nothing. The juxtaposition of the images is as important as the images themselves, though this textbook characteristic of imagism is not something I am particularly concerned with at present, since I am here interested in Hulme’s positive presentation of the construction of a dwelling for us amidst the cinders.

Such a dwelling has more needs to fulfil than purely utilitarian ones. We have seen that for Hulme the instinct for belief in the deity is part of humankind’s fixed nature. In ‘Notes on Language and Style’, a view of the dome of Brompton Oratory apparently floating in the mist suggests to him the process by which the construction of reality through language also goes beyond the utilitarian human dwelling so that it encompasses a location for the deity: ‘And the words moved until they became a dome, a solid, separate world, a dome in the mist, a thing of terror beyond us, and not of us. Definite heaven above worshippers, incense hides foundations. A definite force majeure (all the foundations of the scaffolding are in us, but we want an illusion, falsifying us, something independent of foundations)’ (CW, pp. 27-8). We have here again the image of scaffolding, rooted in nothing but ourselves and when dismantled leaving the overarching dome apparently a thing-in-itself, independent enough of its constructors to cause them ‘terror’. The stage of making this dwelling ‘other’, of removing the scaffolding, Hulme associates with ‘art’: ‘the mist effect, the transformation in words, has the art of pushing it through the door’ (CW, p. 28). The ‘door’ would seem to be the way into another world, the ‘imaginary land which all of us carry about in desert moments’; art gives ‘a sense of wonder, a sense of being united in another mystic world’ (CW, p. 34). This branch of the argument is already beginning to generate its own reversed reflection, however, to which it will be necessary to return. The dome we have built is the heaven above the worshippers, and it inspires terror. This, as we know, is going to be a real terror for Hulme, but the terror is going to be more fundamental than the attribution of its origin, for the vault of heaven at this early stage of his thought can simply be resolved into a misprision of one of the tracks left in the cinders by the networks of language, a product of the constitution of the club.

Hulme’s emphasis on the power of language to construct a ‘dwelling’ for us calls to mind Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in which Heidegger reaches back to what he calls the ‘primal nature of these meanings’ (Heidegger, 1975, p. 148), which are available through the etymology of German words but are silenced in the everyday traffic of language as verbal counters. Similarities there certa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks
• 2 A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism and Modernist Theories of Language
• 3 ‘A Definite Meaning’: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme
• 4 Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis
• 5 T. E. Hulme and the ‘Spiritual Dread of Space’
• 6 Hulme’s Compromise and The New Psychologism
• 7 Hulme Among the Progressives
• 8 Towards a ‘Right Theory of Society’?: Politics, Machine Aesthetics, and Religion
• 9 ‘Above Life’: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and Two Trajectories of Ethical Anti-Humanism
• 10 The Politics of Epochality: Antinomies of Original Sin
• 11 Hulme’s Feelings
• Bibliography
• Index