THE MEETINGS AT the Tour Eiffel may have ceased, but Hulme created another kind of cultural gathering, in a different venue and with an extended guest list, which this time included artists and intellectuals as well as poets. He had developed a relationship some time in 1911 with a Mrs Ethel Kibblewhite, who lived at 67 Frith Street in Soho, an elegant and spacious Georgian house which had once been the Venetian embassy. Her father owned the house, and ran his ecclesiastical stained-glass business from the first floor. Dolly Kibblewhite, as she was known, had escaped with her two children from a violent husband some eight years earlier, and lived with her family on the other three floors. Hulme never moved in, but now did most of his work in a large room there put at his disposal. Dolly was a painter, who had trained at the Slade, and she drew a rather fine pencil sketch of Hulme in which he looks thoughtful, even a little melancholy, rather gentler and more pensive than he does in photographs, in which he tends to stare aggressively out at the camera. In place of his Thursday dinners at the Tour Eiffel, Hulme began to hold Tuesday soirées in Frith Street, in a large salon with, it is said, ‘First Empire mirrors and chandeliers’.124 Guests mingled, drank beer and discussed ideas, while Hulme – himself a teetotaller and non-smoker – ‘argued’, according to J.C. Squire, a frequent guest, ‘with anyone who was willing to cope with him, or soliloquised on almost any theme, ancient or modern’.125 Dolly Kibblewhite would be one of the few women present – H.D. would sometimes be another – but on the whole Hulme thought women distracted a man from intellectual argument.
According to his biographer, Robert Ferguson, Hulme now spent most of his afternoons in Frith Street (like Pound he was a late riser) working, or playing Go obsessively with Dolly, as he had played draughts when a boy with his mother. Dolly was ten years older than he was, and Ferguson suggests she looked rather like his mother; perhaps emotionally she played a role in his life rather like that of his aunt Alice Pattinson, a kindly mother substitute. He certainly, according to all reports, carried on his promiscuous sexual activity elsewhere unabated. Dolly was devoted to Hulme, and they remained a couple, albeit an unorthodox one, until his death. Shortly after Pound and Hulme met up again, Hulme introduced Pound to A.R. Orage, editor of The New Age, possibly at one of these soirées. Orage could not have been unaware of the reputation Pound was building, and he took to him personally, even if he rarely liked his poetry, putting him in touch with a publisher, Swift & Co., who offered the stipend which Pound had mentioned to his father. More significantly, certainly in the long run, Orage invited Pound to write for the New Age. Pound was delighted, telling Margaret Cravens on 6 November that they wanted him ‘to do a Troubadour Romance’; one suspects it was Pound who suggested the subject-matter.126 This ‘Troubadour Romance’ was to appear weekly over twelve weeks, and Orage agreed to pay Pound a guinea a week, although the New Age did not generally pay its contributors. (He had earlier paid Flint, so perhaps he paid those he knew were short of money.) Pound was grateful – he was still trying to turn himself into a good matrimonial prospect, and in addition, to do him credit, his letters to Margaret suggest a certain anxiety about taking her money, and an effort to reassure her that he would soon be making his own way. Pound’s income was actually better than ever before, with his £200 a year from Margaret, and the £100 a year from Swift & Co., but his engagement depended on earning more than that. And if Orage’s money were a welcome extra in 1911, it would be a lifeline for Pound during the dark years of the war.
When Pound’s ‘Troubadour Romance’ appeared, it consisted of a mixture of translations and articles, beginning on 30 November not with a troubadour, but with Pound’s latest wandering poet, ‘The Seafarer’; the later translations were from Arnaut Daniel and Guido Cavalcanti. The series was called ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, which suggests that Pound had not lost his interest in Frazer, whose fourth volume of The Golden Bough, The Dying God, which discusses Osiris, had come out that month.127 Osiris, the myth goes, was the divine king of Egypt, who with his wife and sister, the goddess Isis, brought agricultural arts and wine-making to the Egyptians, before he was murdered and his body scattered in fourteen pieces by his brother Set. Painstakingly, Isis gathered the scattered limbs, and Osiris came back to life. For Pound the metaphor is that of salvaging the neglected poetic masterpieces of the past to revive the art of poetry in the present – the process he would describe more ruefully in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain ‘the sublime’
In the old sense. Wrong from the start –128
If Ford read these articles, he would not have felt that he was having much impact on Pound, who in this series continued to celebrate the pre-Renaissance and firmly rejected the idea of using everyday language in poetry. The main source for what was new here was Hulme, whose lectures on Bergson Pound and Dorothy both attended. These were given in a private drawing-room in Kensington, in the home of a Mrs Franz Liebich. Hulme’s loyal disciple Tancred helped to sell tickets – 10s. 6d for the four. These lectures made a significant impression on Pound: ideas that he had ignored in 1909 he now seized on, and in the Osiris articles Hulmean ideas and phrases are liberally scattered across his prose. There had been similarities between his thought and Hulme’s even in the Tour Eiffel days, not only their desire for a virile poetry but also their shared preference for immediacy rather than abstraction, something Pound now belatedly began to recognise. Critics have tended to set up Hulme and Ford against each other as alternative and mutually exclusive influences on Pound’s imagism; indeed, the dispute has been going on since 1915, and in later life Pound claimed vigorously, though misleadingly, that Ford was by far the major influence. The truth seems to be that Pound absorbed elements from each of them, without in either case agreeing with all they said. What Pound would later say admiringly of Cavalcanti applied also to his pre-war self: ‘Guido is eclectic, he swallows none of his authors whole’.129 Yet if Pound was now ready to think about Hulme’s ideas, perhaps the discombobulation caused by Ford’s horror at the Canzoni, and his disconcerting roll on the floor, played a part in making him ready to revise his poetic theories. Hulme and Ford both wanted a more modern, direct form of writing, and Pound, as ‘Δ
ρια’ had indicated, was, like the advocates of vers libre at the Tour Eiffel, now moving steadily away from traditional metre and rhyme, even if he described that move in terms of a return to classical quantified verse or to Anglo-Saxon stressed alliteration.
Orage must have felt, when ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ came into the New Age office, that its title would convey little to his readers, because for the first few weeks an editorial note was appended which ran: ‘Under this heading Mr Pound will contribute expositions and translations in illustration of the “New Method in Scholarship”.’ The reference to scholarship may seem surprising, but Pound had not yet entirely ruled out an academic job – he had in fact just had an encouraging letter from a Cambridge academic saying he thought his work deserved ‘academic recognition and reward’ – and he would certainly never drop his campaign to combat the way literature was taught in the American university system.130 (And he would succeed: as Gail McDonald has convincingly demonstrated, Pound and Eliot between them were to play an important role in changing the way literature was taught in universities, and the dominance of ‘appreciation’ in schools of English from the 1950s to the 1980s owes much to the doctrines that Pound was already preaching in these pre-war years.)131 The ‘new method’ itself, however, appears to have been directly inspired by Hulme’s lectures.
The first of these was on 23 November. ‘Rather good,’ Pound reported home, instructing his parents, as he did Margaret, to subscribe to the New Age, where they could read Hulme on Bergson, one reason for taking the magazine, the other being of course his own appearance there: now he was a contributor, Pound wanted the subscription list to increase so that Orage would be persuaded he was good for sales.132 ‘Its a mad sheet,’ he told Margaret, ‘but I ought to be worth 3d per copy’.133 But the enthusiasm for Hulme was genuine. The following March he was still describing him to his mother as ‘a braw yorkshireman’ (Pound’s geography was as hazy as his history) and ‘very good sort’.134 Over the next few months, he was to see a good deal of Hulme.
The two extant essays most likely to have formed the basis for Hulme’s lectures are ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’ and ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’.135 Pound’s ‘new method’ draws on Hulme’s exposition, in the first of these essays, of Bergson’s analysis of the two modes of understanding: on the one hand, the intellect, which is ‘rational or mechanical’ and which always simplifies and distorts through the crude approximations of language; and on the other hand, intuition, ‘vital and more instinctive’, as well as more ‘complex’, a mode of understanding particularly familiar to ‘any literary man or artist’.136 Hulme points out that this distinction is not new, citing Edmund Burke, perhaps a telltale sign, it has been suggested, of the politically conservative turn his thought was soon to take; the thinker Pound would more likely associate with the two modes was Pater, who predated Bergson in his rejection of the false solidity given to the external world by language and in his emphasis on the vital pulsating moment of experience.137 In the first of Pound’s expository articles, on 7 December 1911, he sets out his own comparable intuitive method of scholarship – that of the ‘Luminous Detail’, as he calls it: facts that suddenly illuminate, whose transmission is ‘swift and easy’ and which ‘govern knowledge as the switchboard governs an electric circuit’. This method is ‘most vigorously hostile to the prevailing mode of today – that is the method of multitudinous detail, and to the method of yesterday, the method of sentiment and generalisation’, both of which, he asserts, as Bergson says of the rationalising intellect, distort rather than extend understanding.138
Pound puts forward this method of ‘Luminous Detail’ in part as a justification of his imitations of earlier writers in Canzoni and his translations of Daniel and Cavalcanti, as well as those in The Spirit of Romance, in whose preface he had already insisted that it was important to read the ‘masterwork’, not ‘mediocrity’.139 His translations were not, he insists, just the work of an antiquarian, ‘rather a scholar than a poet’, as one reviewer of Canzoni had unkindly put it: he had been picking out ‘luminous details’ from the past, because, he says – in defiance of Ford’s insistence in The Critical Attitude that writers must concentrate on the present – he is setting ‘forth some defence of a hope … that this sort of work may not fail utterly to be of service to the living art. For it is certain that we have had no “greatest poet” and no “great period” save at, or after, a time when many people were busy examining the media and the traditions of the art.’140
Yet what is most important in Pound’s theory of the ‘Luminous Detail’ is not its application to ‘scholarship’, but his extension of it to art itself: ‘The artist,’ he writes, ‘seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment’.141 (Presenting without comment is something he also learnt from Ford, so there is a fusion of influences here.) The luminous detail is perhaps his first real move towards the doctrine of imagism, where the image’s impact is instantaneous and powerful, a sudden illumination, bearing out another of Hulme’s propositions, that ‘the essentially aesthetic emotion’ is ‘the excitement which is generated by direct communication’.142 Pound’s ‘luminous detail’ is in some ways a development of his own earlier ideas – his simplification, for example, of Browning’s dramatic monologue so that only a vital, illuminating moment is presented, and his emphasis, learnt from Yeats and Wilde, on the avoidance of didacticism and rhetoric. It belatedly, one might argue, acknowledges Flint’s earlier campaign for poetry like the Japanese, in which the image gives the reader ‘the resonant heart of an exquisite moment’. The idea of the ‘luminous detail’ is also, however, a rejection of the kinds of elaboration and stasis that had crept into Canzoni. Pound adds a note to the effect that ‘As scholarship has erred in presenting all detail as if of equal import … in a present school of writing we see a similar tendency’.143 Who does he have in mind? It sounds like a forerunner of Virginia Woolf’s denunciation of the fact-filled Edwardian novel in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, but Pound had read few of those novels – not that that always prevented him from making his attacks. Pound was perhaps rethinking how he should write his own poetry. Like Virginia Woolf, at that period working on her first novel, he now wanted to create art through which the vital and dynamic texture of life could be conveyed, not works in which ‘life escapes’.144
Besides this emphasis on the centrality of artistic intution, there are other of Hulme’s ideas echoed in the articles, especially his insistence that art can be defined as ‘a passionate desire for accuracy’.145 ‘Accurate’, ‘exact’, ‘precise’, ‘direct’ are words that become central to Pound’s aesthetic vocabulary, and, as for Hulme, they refer at this stage to the delineation of a psychological state: imagist poetry would aim to convey, as evocatively and tellingly as possible, a particular psychic moment.146
Hulme emphasises that, according to Bergson, most people at most times are limited to ‘stock perceptions’, because ‘human perception … has certain fixed habits, certain fixed ways of seeing things, and so is unable to see things as they are’.147 Hence, for Hulme, the challenge for the artist lies in conveying the ‘individuality of the emotion’, or ‘the individuality of things’.148 Pound follows him, warning against ‘sling[ing] generalities’. One must give ‘the particular case for what it is worth; the truth is the individual’.149 He stresses, as Hulme does, the importance of escaping from ‘cliché’, those ‘magnetized groups that stand between the reader of poetry and the drive of it’, and he shares Hulme’s conviction that the artist has to bring freedom from stock perceptions and set ideas.150 That society in general was convention-bound was a view Pound shared with many young people of his day: he had been acutely conscious of this in Philadelphia, and it was bearing in on him, after his attempted negotiations with the Shakespear family, that the situation was not as different as he had thought in England. The role of the artist was to bring liberation from this conventionalised thought.
Pound, however, never wholly accepted Hulme’s Nietzschean, Bergsonian view of language as inherently crude and inadequate, perhaps the reason why he continued writing poetry while Hulme abandoned it: before Pound’s ‘Osiris’ series concluded, ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme’, five poems in all, not all Hulme wrote but the ones he presumably wished to be known by, appeared in the New Age on 25 January 1912.151 There is, indeed, an aporia or logical contradiction at the heart of Hulme’s argument here: given his view of the distortions inevitably imposed by language, the poet can surely never achieve total ‘accuracy’ in his delineation of an emotion, only some kind of metaphorical approximation. Hulme acknowledges the difficulty and the rarity of achieving this ‘accuracy’, but it surely is the wrong word, though symptomatic of his dilemma as a convinced metaphysical relativist who temperamentally longed for certainty and boundaries. Pound would come increasingly to need similar absolutes, but he would be more concerned with the way language is frequently used loosely and dishonestly; he repeatedly denounced rhetoric in the most rhetorical terms. The artist, he implies, meets a moral duty rather than an epistemological challenge when he tries to use language ‘accurately’: ‘technique’, as he puts it here, ‘is the only gauge and test of a man’s lasting sincerity’.152
Pound, however, also acknowledges that to be a poet is to some extent a gift. Hulme talks of different kinds of minds, some more attuned to the visual, others to rhythms and Pound has a similar but more extended discussion of different ways of thinking, including as his final category those ‘favoured of Apollo’, who think ‘in words that hover above and cling close to the things they mean’.153 This is an intriguing and compelling metaphor, all the more effective because it allows for approximation rather than the exactitude he demands elsewhere; Pound returned to it again a few weeks later (he rather charmingly uses inverted commas when he quotes himself), saying ‘it is not until poetry lives again “close to the thing” that it will be a vital part of the contemporary life’.154 Pound believed that there are realities beyond language that the artist strives to capture, so in that sense he is aware of language’s limitations, but he wants to claim that the artist can overcome them; his poetic theories are a succession of metaphors for an Adamic, unfallen language that would bring together word and thing, poetic phrase and visionary insight, and communicate instantly and totally. As early as 1907, he had told Viola Baxter that he thought ‘artistic utterance’ was what Swedenborg had meant by ‘angelic language’, the same unfallen language that Adam spoke.155 The ‘absolute rhythm’ of which he had written to Floyd Dell, and in his introduction to the Cavalcanti, which conveyed a ‘particular’ and ‘exact’ emotion, had been another version of art’s instant, accurate communication; the ‘luminous detail’, with its ‘swift and easy’ transmission, was his latest. In his successive definitions of the image, he would offer more.156
In the concluding essay of ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,’ which appeared on 15 February and which discusses the twelfth-century Arnaut Daniel, Pound made it very clear that he was still at odds with Ford’s belief in everyday language: ‘we must have a simplicity and directness of utterance, which is different from the simplicity and directness of daily speech, which is more “curial” [that is, “priestly”], more dignified. This difference, this dignity, cannot be conferred by florid adjectives or elaborate hyperbole; it must be conveyed by art, and by the art of the verse structure … Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.’157 Pound would in one sense always hold to this, insisting that poetry must use a heightened, intensive language; in that way it always differs from the looseness of everyday language. Even though he came to draw on the language of daily speech for some of his poetry, he continued to follow the argument put forward by Hulme that ordinary language has to be transformed by art in order to convey ‘the individuality and freshness of things’. There is no indication, it should be said, that Pound ever thought about the Bergsonian philosophy behind Hulme’s propositions, even though he concurs with many of Hulme’s conclusions. Even when they share a vocabulary they present their points very differently. For all his critique of logical thought, Hulme in his lectures and articles embodies his theories in a worked-out argument, while Pound simply offers a series of pronouncements; he thought intuitively and ignored logic, but he never employed a Bergsonian argument for doing so.
‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ was Hulme’s last piece of writing directly on Bergson. His own ideas were evolving rapidly at this period, and by the spring of 1912 he was writing political pieces, though he kept straying back to art. In a series that appeared in a political journal called the Commentator, under the pseudonym Thomas Gratton, posthumously published as a single essay called ‘A Tory Philosophy’, he tries out a distinction which in political terms divides Tory and Radical, proponents of Order against defenders of Liberty, believers in Constancy as against believers in Progress, and which in art divides Classicism and Romanticism. In each case, he himself is in favour of the first term. He developed the importance of these ideas for art in a lecture he gave in July, published as the essay which so impressed Eliot, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. This essay is probably Hulme’s best-known piece, misleadingly so, as far as his own thought was concerned, as it was very much a transitional work, but it came to be seen as exemplary of the position to which the high modernism of Eliot and Pound would move in the 1920s. Hulme himself would soon be rejecting everything since the Renaissance as well as its Greek sources, but for now he asserts, ‘After a hundred years of romanticism we are in for a classical revival’. Romanticism, he claims, sprang from Rousseau’s dangerous and mistaken belief that human beings were innately good, simply damaged and corrupted by bad and oppressive laws; classicism, for Hulme, insists that ‘Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be can be got out of him.’ This is in line with the ‘sane classical dogma of original sin’. The classical view is the religious one: ‘part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity … It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities’.158 Romanticism follows on from ‘the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism’, which turns people into agnostics, so suppressing the natural instinct to be religious:
Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.159
Hulme’s comments here on the danger of suppressing instincts suggest some acquaintance with Freudian ideas, though he is very much turning them to his own ends. More recent psychoanalytical theorists would be intrigued by Hulme’s own horror of ‘mess’ and ‘blur’, his choice of the viscosity and stickiness of treacle to express all he abhors in Romanticism. As I suggested earlier, Hulme’s anxieties about masculinity are fundamental to his aesthetic and political theories. Classical verse is ‘dry’ and ‘hard’, much more suitable for men. Romantics are characterised by ‘the sloppiness which doesn’t consider a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other’; they think that ‘poetry that isn’t damp isn’t poetry at all’. Romanticism is still in the ascendancy: ‘if good classical verse were to be written tomorrow very few people would be able to stand it’.160 But, Hulme prophesies, that will change. The kind of modern verse he had been advocating since 1908 will emerge. He no longer, however, makes the analogy with Impressionism, but notes that Maurice Denis has explained that the Post-Impressionists ‘consider themselves classical in the sense that they were trying to impose the same order on the mere flux of new material provided by the impressionist movement, that existed in the more limited materials of the painting before.’161
Pound did not hear the lecture, but he and Hulme would certainly have discussed the ideas. He was already in sympathy with much of the gendered aesthetics here, making the very Hulmean and misogynistic pronouncement in his final Osiris article: ‘As long as the poet says not what he, at the very crux of a clarified conception, means, but is content to say something ornate and approximate, just so long will serious people, intently alive, consider poetry as balderdash – a sort of embroidery for dilettantes and women.’162 Pound’s two most enthusiastic readers, Margaret and Dorothy, were women, but he appears to forget this. Poetry is to be professional, exact and virile. Pound, though showing no interest in classicism, took over much of Hulme’s attack on the nineteenth century, though he still admired Swinburne, whom Hulme reviled, and was by no means ready to retract his reverence for the Rhymers, particularly Yeats. He wrote in another article that February, entitled ‘Prologomena’ (he meant ‘prolegomena’, but mispelt it by analogy, one supposes, with prologue), published in the recently founded Poetry Review: ‘As for the nineteenth century, with all respect to its achievements, I think we shall look back upon it as a rather blurry, messy sort of a period, a rather sentimentalistic, mannerish sort of period’. (Note his distaste, shared with Hulme, for ‘mess’ and ‘blur’.) He sees, however, a definite break beginning with Swinburne: ‘The conception of poetry as a “pure art” … revived with Swinburne. From the puritanical revolt [he refers of course to Milton] to Swinburne, poetry had been merely the vehicle … the ox-cart and post-chaise for transmitting thoughts poetic or otherwise … Mr Yeats has once and for all stripped English poetry of its perdamnable rhetoric. He has boiled away all that is not poetic – and a good deal that is. He has become a classic in his own lifetime and nel mezzo del cammin. He has made our poetic idiom a thing pliable, a speech without inversions.’163 After this tribute to Yeats, however, when he turns to the future, he has much in common with Hulme’s tough talking:
As to Twentieth century poetry, and the poetry which I expect to see written during the next decade or so, it will, I think, move against poppy-cock, it will be harder and saner, it will be what Mr Hewlett calls “nearer the bone”. It will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretative power (of course poetic force does always rest there); I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have few painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.
Earlier in the article, Pound had again defended his interest in the past, what he describes as his ‘pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients’: this is worth stressing because he also made one other comment which is very frequently misquoted, or rather selectively and therefore misleadingly quoted. In what is probably a response to both Ford’s desire for modernity and Hulme’s earlier belief that all poetry more than twenty years old should be destroyed (by 1912 Hulme appears to have thought that at least Shakespeare and Pope should be spared), Pound begins a sentence by saying ‘No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old’, a statement that is quoted in numerous literary histories as if Pound were dismissing the past and his archaisms at last, and advocating a distinctly modern style. In fact he goes on to qualify the statement markedly, continuing: ‘for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, and not from life, yet a man feeling the divorce of his life and his art may naturally try to resurrect a forgotten mode … if he think he see in it some element lacking in contemporary art which might unite that art again to its sustenance, life.’164 As long as it is well over twenty years old, that’s fine. He goes on, of course, to talk of the importance of Dante and Cavalcanti. This is an argument with Hulme that Pound could be said to have won. By 1913, Hulme was advocating the study of ancient art and agreeing that for modern art it was necessary, as the French would put it, to ‘se reculer pour mieux sauter’, which one might freely translate as ‘step backwards in order to make a better jump forward’, in other words, to make the leap that would be modernism.