I

ON 22 JANUARY 1914, two days after a report of the poets’ visit to Blunt appeared in The Times, a piece of publicity that Pound relished, he returned to London to speak at the Quest Society, where two years before he had given his talk on ‘Psychology and the Troubadaours’. This time he was one of three speakers, as he explained to his mother: ‘Hulme lectured at the QUEST last night on futurism and post-impressionism, followed by fervent harangues from Wyndham Lewis and myself’.¹ Pound had not seen much of Hulme since the latter had returned from his Berlin exile the previous May. He sometimes attended Hulme’s Tuesdays, but their long discussions of the metaphysics of art had become a thing of the past. Flint, having forgiven Hulme for the delayed payment, seems to have seen him much more frequently. Hulme was now writing art criticism for the New Age rather than philosophy, whilst Pound up to this point, in spite of his admiration for Epstein and more recently Gaudier, had taken very little interest in what was happening on the art scene. Nor had Pound seen much of Lewis since their wary first meetings on his first sojourn in London. After the evening at the Quest Society, all that would change.

Lewis had in the last few years achieved much notoriety and just occasional admiration in the art world. Since the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition, experimental work like his own, influenced by European modernist art, had been flourishing in London. In 1911, Lewis joined the Camden Town Group, whose president was his friend Spencer Gore, and exhibited with them, being, he claims, immediately picked out for expressions of special horror by the critics, who would typically write: ‘Despite the alarming announcement of the character of this “Group”, we find that amongst this band of honest, hardworking young men (with one exception) that good old English conservatism has saved them from excess … That one exception is Mr Wyndham Lewis, whose blackguardly, preposterous, putrid etc.’ Even Lewis’ friend Sturge Moore was dubious about what one critic described as Lewis’ ‘geometrical experiments’. Yet in the Allied Artists Salon of 1912, held in the Royal Albert Hall, Lewis’ large painting, The Kermesse (a ‘kermesse’ being a Breton folk festival), drew the admiration of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, Bell suggesting the painting had the unity of a Beethoven sonata, and Fry commending the ‘tense and compact design’ as well as the painting’s ‘Dionysiac energy’. Roger Fry invited Lewis to contribute to the British section of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition; Bell made the selection, choosing two large pictures and some illustrations for Timon of Athens, the play that centres on the most disillusioned and misanthropic of Shakespeare’s protagonists, whose devastating critique of a money-obsessed society Lewis felt appropriate to the present state of England.²

From the start, Lewis’ propensity for imagining slights made his relationship with Fry uneasy, but Fry asked him to exhibit with his own Grafton Group in April 1913, and to join the Omega Workshop when it opened in June. It was, as so often with Lewis, a brief collaboration. Lewis walked out in dudgeon in October, suspecting Fry of having cheated him out of a commission. He took several of the other artists with him, including Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton and Edward Wadsworth, and they jointly sent a round robin to all likely supporters of the Omega project, denouncing Fry’s actions, and adding: ‘As to [Omega’s] tendencies in Art, they alone would be sufficient to make it very difficult for any vigorous art instinct to remain long under that roof. The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck, and its skin is “greenery-yallery”, despite the Post-What-Not fashionableness of its draperies.’ They had needed Lewis and his friends to provide the ‘rough’, ‘masculine’ art; their own was no more than ‘a pleasant tea-party’.³ Hulme, equally opposed to Fry and his fellow Bloomsbury artists, said in a review in the New Age of Fry’s Grafton Group exhibition that January that with the departure of Lewis and his friends, the remaining painters (he is referring to Fry and Grant) represented a ‘backwater … What is living and important in new art must be looked for elsewhere’. In Fry’s work, the ‘colour is always rather sentimental and pretty. He … accomplishes the extraordinary feat of adapting the austere Cézanne into something quite fitted for chocolate boxes.’ Fry’s painting, he notes, had been described as ‘cultured’, a word Hulme immediately associates with effete Cambridge dilettantes and ‘gentle little Cambridge jokes’; these painters, he says dismissively, have a curious similarity to the Pre-Raphaelites, perhaps because the ‘same English aesthetic’ lies behind both movements, and ‘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’.⁴ Bloomsbury designs have indeed been used commercially, which one might think wholly appropriate, since Fry’s aim in the workshops was, like William Morris, to bring art into the domestic environment. Like Lewis’, Hulme’s scorn might be seen as typical of the high modernist disdain for the marketplace, the domestic and the feminine, but there is also some class warfare going on here. The Cambridge gentlemanly dilettantes, only capable of producing or appreciating such effeminate works as pretty chocolate box designs, are to be despised for their ‘slop and romanticism’; virile art is to be found elsewhere.

The lecture that Hulme gave on 22 January was on ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, and, as he reportedly mumbled it at the time, the present-day reader probably has a much better idea of what he said than did the members of the Quest Society. Pound described it in the Egoist as ‘almost wholly unintelligible’, but he was sitting on the platform, and clearly grasped some of the important points.⁵ Hulme was largely paraphrasing the ideas of the art historian and theorist Wilhelm Worringer, whose ground-breaking book, Abstraction and Empathy, had excited him tremendously when he discovered it during his time in Germany, providing him with the perfect answer to his fundamental dilemma: how could someone with a desperate desire for absolute solutions cope with a world without certainties or answers? Hulme had made clear, in an article on Epstein the previous December, that he had moved on from his rejection of Romanticism two years before to ‘a repugnance’ for the world-view of all philosophy since the Renaissance. This philosophy had first taken the form of humanism, then degenerated into a belief in ‘Progress’, and was now, he averred, disintegrating, and he used Worringer’s work to reinforce his argument.⁶ For Worringer, there were two fundamentally different forms of art, in Hulme’s translation, the geometric and the vital. The latter describes classical Greek art and modern art since the Renaissance; in other words, representational art, the art, Hulme told his audience, they would think natural. The former is the kind of art produced by the Egyptians, Indians and Byzantines, highly stylised, showing, in contrast to the naturalism of vital art, ‘what Worringer calls the tendency to abstraction’. Hulme attacks the notion, widespread at the time, that geometric art was produced by people who were not skilled enough to work naturalistically; these different forms of art are the outcome, not of difference in skill, but of two very different world-views. Complacent humanism or progressivism, which sees ‘a happy pantheistic relation between man and the outside world’, produces naturalistic art; geometric art comes from a world-view that, on the contrary, sees a separation between humankind and the rest of the world, such as is found, for example, among ‘more primitive people’, with their fearful awareness of the ‘lack of order and seeming arbitrariness’ of things, and also in the other great non-Western cultures: ‘No knowledge could damp down the Indian inborn fear of the world, since it stands, not as in the case of primitive man before knowledge, but above it.’ Geometric art springs from what Worringer calls a spiritual ‘“space-shyness” in face of the varied confusion and arbitrariness of existence’. One can hear here an echo of Hulme’s own earlier ‘space-shyness’ when he encountered the ‘flat spaces and wide horizons of the Canadian prairie’, of his insistent efforts in his poems to make the sky and stars more homely, and his troubled conviction that the world had no meaning or pattern, but was simply a ‘chaos’ or ‘cinderheap’. He is not rejecting the Bergsonian analysis of the world as flux, but he now believes that the creation of geometric shapes offers ‘a refuge from the flux and impermanence of outside nature’. Geometric art seeks to transform the changing and uncertain world into something more ‘fixed and necessary’.⁷

Worringer had compared this ‘space-shyness’ to ‘the fear which makes certain people unable to cross open spaces’, in other words, agoraphobia, a much discussed condition at the time, thought to be exacerbated by modern city spaces, so specifically a very modern, as well as very primitive, fear.⁸ Among Hulme’s papers is an undated note which says, ‘the fright of the mind before the unknown created not only the first gods, but the first art’, a sentence translated from Worringer that Herbert Read used as the epigraph for the published version of this lecture.⁹ Hulme, who had turned to poetry out of his own ‘fright of the mind before the unknown’, must have found that Worringer spoke directly to his condition.

Worringer’s book was the publication of his Ph.D. thesis, written in 1906. He had worked in the Paris Trocadéro museum, where Picasso at around that very time had discovered African art, but while Worringer was deeply impressed by this non-European art, he was unaware of the impact it was beginning to have on European artists. He writes in the book that, though in his alienated existence in the modern world, ‘man is now just as lost and helpless vis-à-vis the world picture as primitive man’, abstract art is not possible in modern individualistic society.¹⁰ In other words, he believes abstract art is what the modern world needs, but can’t achieve. By 1910, when he wrote the preface to the third edition, Worringer had learnt that he had been too pessimistic, and he says there how much pleasure he has had from hearing from practising artists who feel his work is in tune with what they are attempting to do. This is the point that Hulme goes on to make. Not only, he says, are people beginning to appreciate this archaic and Oriental art, but the most significant modern artists are beginning to move towards a similar geometric style. Hulme cites Cézanne as perhaps the most important so far of the artists who show the ‘tendency to abstraction’, but he also mentions the work of Picasso, Epstein and Wyndham Lewis.

Hulme goes further than Worringer, who advocates a new appreciation of this abstract art but does not explicitly denounce the representational tradition. In Hulme’s account, naturalist art becomes dishonest, superficial and banal, abstract art an unflinching confrontation of the true, grim nature of existence. In contrast to art that springs from ‘flat and insipid optimism of the belief in progress’, this new art may appear ‘inhuman, pessimistic’. Its terms of approbation will not be ‘graceful, beautiful, etc.’, but ‘austere, mechanical, clear-cut, and bare’. Although as it develops this new abstract art may be very different from archaic art forms, to start on that road many of these artists first drew on earlier traditions; hence, Hulme said, ‘you get the explanation of the fact which may have puzzled some people, that a new and modern art, something which was to culminate in the use of a structural organisation akin to machinery, should have begun by what seemed like a romantic return to barbarous and primitive art, apparently inspired by a kind of nostalgia for the past’.¹¹ Hulme is rather shamefaced in his concession here that a return to the past is necessary, so very different from his insistence in 1908 on the desirability of the complete destruction of all verse more than twenty years old; one can imagine Pound thinking triumphantly that his own return to the past was vindicated.

Hulme ends by saying he believes this new art presages a change in sensibility and in general outlook, and he could be said to be right. The years ahead would see, at any rate among intellectuals, a widespread loss of faith in progress and the benefits of modernity, and a much darker view of the human condition, a pessimism reinforced and in some cases caused by the disasters of the First World War and its aftermath. The sense of meaninglessness and uncertainty that Hulme identifies has been seen as the result of the collapse of Christian belief and the rapid growth of secularism, but Hulme would not have agreed. He argues that the false optimism of humanism came from the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement, but certainly not from religion. Hulme identified his pessimistic view of the world as the religious one, though his idea of religion was scarcely orthodox Christianity. Of course, the Church agreed with him on Original Sin, but what about Heaven, the forgiveness of sins, the workings of Providence, God’s purpose in the world? Hulme ignored them; his view of religion had perhaps more in it of a dark Calvinism, but he would never agree that religious faith could encourage complacency, or, to put it more positively, a sense of security. He was one of the many modernists to put himself in the religious camp, but entirely to reinvent the accepted meaning of religion.

Wyndham Lewis followed after Hulme, speaking equally inaudibly; Pound summed up his talk as saying that ‘you could set a loaf of bread in an engine shop and that this would not cause said loaf to produce cubist paintings’, so presumably he was defending his paintings from the charge that they showed no skill or artistry.¹² Pound came last, to the audience’s great relief speaking in tones they could hear, and gave a lively talk, in which he appears to have put forward an idea that had first appeared in ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’, that the good artist does not just passively receive impressions but actively creates, and he finished by reading some of Hulme’s and his own poetry.

The visit to Blunt was written up by Aldington in the Egoist for 2 February 1914, and the Quest evening reported on by Pound on the 16th, in a piece entitled ‘The New Sculpture’. The two events, though so different, had an underlying link which one might describe as the rejection of the imperial belief in the inevitability and rightness of Western progress, though that was scarcely the language either Pound or Aldington would have used. Pound would be honing his attack on contemporary society in the next few months in blunter and more direct terms. Yeats had ended his address to Blunt by saying, ‘Ezra Pound has a desire personally to insult the world’, and in Pound’s article he made it his business to do just that: ‘Modern civilisation has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits and we who are the heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo, we artists who have been so long despised are about to take over control’.¹³ The presence of witch-doctors there goes back to Allen Upward, but the article takes off from Hulme’s critique of humanism and representational art, Pound condemning Greek sculpture out of hand as ‘super-fashion plates’ that remind ‘all rightly constituted young futurists of cake-icing and plaster of Paris’, though he does point out, contra Hulme’s blanket dismissal of Greek culture, that in their tragedy they recognise ‘chaos and death and the then inexplicable forces of destiny and nothingness and beyond’. His rejection of humanism is also in rather different terms from Hulme’s. Humanism did not, Pound avers, in practice make much impact on society in general, but ‘took refuge in the arts’. For a long time artists were humanists trying to save humanity from itself, but the artist today recognises that

the war between him and the world is a war without truce. That his only remedy is slaughter. This is a mild way to say it. Mr Hulme was quite right in saying that the difference between the new art and the old was not a difference in degree but a difference in kind; a difference in intention … The artist has no longer any belief or suspicion that the mass, the half-educated simpering general, the semi-connoisseur, the sometimes collector, and still less the readers of the ‘Spectator’ and the ‘English Review’ can in any way share his delights or understand his pleasure in forces.

One might call this the Stone Cottage doctrine of the ‘blind and ignorant town’, though Pound would in practice never cease to try and convince his public of something or other, however much he held to this elitist view of art in theory. Yet he is here elaborating his theory of art in terms of the reactionary politics that he and Yeats were coming to share; the artist ‘is born to rule but he has no intention of trying to rule by general franchise … he has dabbled in democracy and he is now done with that folly. We turn back, we artists, to the powers of the air, to the djinns who were our allies aforetime … It is by them we have ruled and shall rule, and by their connivance that we shall mount again into our hierarchy. The aristocracy of entail and of title has decayed, the aristocracy of commerce is decaying, the aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service.’¹⁴

The violence and absolutism of Pound’s language in this article is a provocative assertion of the vigour and hardness of the new art; by this time, Gaudier had started work on a carving of Pound’s head, which Pound instructed him to make look as virile as possible; Gaudier responded by carving the head as a phallus. Pound, Hulme and Lewis were all intent on inventing themselves as representatives of a new kind of masculinity – brash, authoritarian, contemptuous. In March, Pound published a poem in Poetry and Drama defiantly entitled simply, ‘Coitus’, beginning, ‘The gilded phaloi of the crocuses are thrusting at the spring air’.¹⁵ Even the springtime flowers had become plated symbols of an assertive machismo. But with a world war about to start in seven months’ time, Pound’s claim that ‘the only remedy is slaughter’ now seems a chilling one, and his dismissal of democracy a disturbing presage of his later Fascist views. Pound is undoubtedly partly having fun here, but all the same, the seeds of his future attitudes are disturbingly present.

Pound was now seeing more of Hulme again, and he was greatly taken with Wyndham Lewis, who was fast becoming a vital partner in his ‘mouvemong’; by late February Pound would write to his father, ‘The papers are full of Wyndham Lewis’ cubist room that he has done for Lady Drogheda. I dont know that I have written of him but he is more or less one of the gang here at least he is the most “advanced” of the painters and very clever and thoroughly enigmatic.’¹⁶ Though Hulme’s latest ideas had become crucial for Pound once again, Hulme was not to be characterised as part of anyone’s movement but his own. Lewis, it must be said, would later insist that Pound had only been a backward member in his personal movement, though, he admitted, a brilliant publicist for it.

Lewis had found a new base in Great Ormond Street from which to work, rented for him by Kate Lechmere. Lechmere, with whom he had earlier had a brief liaison, and who remained a good friend, was an emancipated and independent woman with private means, though with a surprising weakness for misogynist men. Lewis named his atelier the Rebel Art Centre, and he worked there with the others who had broken with Fry, such as Wadsworth, Etchells and Hamilton, as well as attracting some others, Christopher Nevinson, for example, whose sympathies, it would become clear, were really with the Futurists; there were also two women, Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders, who were much put upon. Pound was a frequent visitor; Dorothy would later tell Noel Stock that he was the only person that Lewis would allow to see his paintings before they were exhibited, as he kept them locked away in a back room for fear others would steal his ideas. Pound could be trusted, presumably because he had no painterly skill and was therefore incapable of artistic theft, though what he would increasingly emulate was Lewis’ paranoia. Lewis organised a series of lectures at the Centre, with speakers including Marinetti, Ford and of course Pound. In April Lewis intended to open as a college, though he had little luck in recruiting students, and he was planning to launch a journal, whose name had already been chosen for maximum ballistic effect: Blast.

Pound was still seeing a good deal of Aldington, H.D. and Flint. He continued to promote their poetry, and he had not forgotten the impact of Flint’s article on French poetry – that March he held it up to Harriet as an example of how one sufficiently good piece could make a journal’s reputation. They for now accepted the extension of the movement to include these sculptors and artists: there are notes extant from H.D. to Flint about visits to a Cubist show and to the Rebel Arts Centre; Aldington was a signatory to the manifesto that appeared in Blast and generally joined in the rebel artists’ boisterous café life. In mid-1914, there was remarkably, for a brief time, no apparent dissension among Pound’s various artistic and literary friends. Aldington mentions Lewis and Gaudier visiting them at their flat, and they were seeing a good deal of Ford. It was at this time that Ford asked H.D. to be his secretary – Brigit must have had enough – and he later dedicated part of The Good Soldier to her. In early May, while Aldington and H.D. were staying with Aldington’s parents in Rye, Ford came to dinner; Aldington describes the evening in his memoirs:

The food and wine were good, and Ford, ever susceptible to the genial influences of the table and good-fellowship, opened the flood-gates of his discourse and babbled o’ green fields – I should say, of celebrities – in his most imaginative strain. A scholarly recluse like my father, with a passion for books and very little acquaintance with writers, was an ideal subject for Ford’s experiments. He sensed the virgin sucker at once. So we had the stories about Ruskin, and my uncle Gabriel and my aunt Christina; the Conrad and James stories; the story of the abbé Liszt’s concert and how Queen Alexandra took the beautiful infant Ford on her knees and kissed him; the ‘old Browning’ stories, and the Swinburne stories; gradually working back through the 19th century. My father was swimming in bliss, although once or twice he looked a little puzzled. And then Ford began telling how he met Byron. I saw my father stiffen.¹⁷

Whether Aldington has further embellished Ford’s embellishments must be open to question; interestingly enough, both H.D. and Aldington’s mother, the provider of the cheering food and wine, disappear from this tale. Aldington’s feelings about Ford would not remain so warm, but when Ford published his long poem ‘On Heaven’ in Poetry that June, Aldington joined Pound in promoting it. He described it in the Egoist as better than anything by Yeats, and Pound announced in Poetry that it was ‘the best poem yet written in the “twentieth-century fashion”’.¹⁸ Presumably they admired its conversational tone, though it is much looser and more wordy than the kind of poetry either of them generally praised, near to vers libre, but with jerky, variable line lengths and awkward rhymes. Max Saunders describes it as ‘curiously poised between natural speech, effective musical form and the cadences of song, and ironic doggerel’, but he also suggests it looks forwad to the kind of modernist narrative poems that Eliot would produce, such as ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, which indeed Fletcher later described as ‘very, very Huefferish’.¹⁹ Perhaps what Aldington and Pound really admired was its subject-matter, a secular Heaven envisaged as the fulfilment of earthly desire. It was dedicated to Violet Hunt, who had asked Ford to write her a poem about a ‘workaday heaven’, but she suspected that the love he is imagining consummating is really that for Brigit Patmore, who had been staying with them when he wrote the poem. Max Saunders points out that Ford would later say to an aspiring poet that a poem should be ‘a quiet monologue during a summer walk in which one seeks to render oneself beloved to someone one loves’; he read the poem to both of them, but one suspects Violet’s suspicions were justified.²⁰

There were perhaps hints of differences opening up between Pound and his fellow imagists: Flint was loyal for now, in spite of Frost’s attempts to exacerbate his somewhat ambivalent feelings about Pound, but Aldington was becoming readier to criticise Pound, who had been quite shaken earlier in January when Aldington pointed out to him that he had ‘used the word delicate 947 times in “Lustra”’, as Pound was already calling the poems that he would finally publish in 1916.²¹ Pound hastily set about seeking alternatives, but Aldington went on to publish a set of parodies of Pound in the Egoist, under the heading of ‘Penultimate Poetry: Xenophilometropolitania’, using the offending word nine times in 42 lines. He also provided a variation on ‘In a Station of the Metro’, imitating Pound’s typographical gaps:

The apparition of these poems in a crowd:

White faces in a black dead faint.²²

This parody’s evocation of the horror produced by Pound’s poems, the shock tactics that amused Aldington so much, is perhaps more affectionate than critical, and Pound assured his father, who was perturbed by Aldington’s lèse-majesté, that he took them as a compliment. Perhaps a more serious indication that Aldington would follow a different track from Pound and Lewis emerged in an article on ‘Anti-Hellenism’ in the same issue in which Aldington deplored the fact that Hellenism had become unfashionable, and declared his opposition to the very ‘change in sensibility’ that Hulme welcomed.²³ Its tone was light-hearted, but the reservations Aldington expressed about this ‘unHellenic’, ‘unhealthy’ art went very deep. But for now he enjoyed being part of a rebellious artistic community. The ‘mouvemong’ was a performance as much as a programme, and he certainly enjoyed performing. He had no wish yet to dissociate himself from Pound and his projects.